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173 papers

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Jul 15, 2026cs.AI

Explaining Reinforcement Learning Agents via Inductive Logic Programming

Explainable Reinforcement Learning (XRL) seeks to make Reinforcement Learning (RL) policies more transparent and interpretable, a key requirement in safety-critical and human-centric scenarios. However, it is mostly based on user studies, thus targeting the needs of a specific audience and lacking shared evaluation metrics. On the other hand, logic-based approaches within eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) provide compact, human-readable abstractions of decision-making. However, the systematic quantification of the explainability degree of logical representations remains an open problem. This work aims to advance the state of the art in XRL by introducing objective and planning-oriented metrics for policy explainability in RL settings. At the same time, it contributes to the field of logic for XAI by providing a principled way to quantify the explainability of logical rules, moving beyond common-sense assessments and simple propositional fragments. We employ Inductive Logic Programming (ILP) to extract symbolic representations of RL policies and define a novel set of explainability metrics, including activation rate, feature coverage, syntactic distance and semantic distance. These metrics quantify alignment between symbolic rules and agent behavior, the role of features in decision-making, and the evolution of policies during training and across agents in single and multi-agent RL. Experiments across different RL domains show that the proposed metrics highlight action-specific learning dynamics beyond global return, provide fine-grained insights into domain features beyond classical approaches for global feature importance estimation, and uncover coordination, specialization, and adaptation patterns in MARL. Moreover, they provide crucial insights for the transfer and generalization of action-specific policies.
Celeste Veronese, Edoardo Zorzi, Daniele Meli +1
Jul 14, 2026cs.LG

Evidence-Grounded Verified Agentic Reasoning: A Path Toward Eliminating LLM Hallucination in Empirical Inference via Tool-Attested Kernel Proofs

Tool access alone does not make LLM empirical reasoning governable: accepted outputs need not descend from attested evidence, and accepted deductions need not hold up under formal scrutiny. We present EG-VAR (Evidence-Grounded Verified Agentic Reasoning), a Lean 4-based tool-calling architecture in which the Lean kernel is the sole minter of Verified claims via tool-attestation axioms and declared source lifts. Every verified output structurally descends from an attested tool call (Thm. 3.1) and a kernel-checked chain of valid inference (Thm. 3.2); residual outputs are honest Abstain with a replayable audit trail. On a subcollection of TableBench numerical reasoning (n=120), EG-VAR attains 120/120 versus a 95% same-tool baseline; on counterfactual stress tests (5 domains x 2 models), EG-VAR stays 100% source-faithful while same-tool drops to 80-90% (no-tool 50-80%). With the LLM as deployment-time formalizer, residual semantic-formalization error is 3.3% on Sonnet and 1.7% on Opus. We position EG-VAR as a technical-governance interface for high-stakes empirical claims: a formal sidecar makes the target proposition, source scope, evidence boundary, proof obligation, and abstention condition auditable, eliminating unsupported Verified outputs today while turning formalization errors, lift and source-authority disputes, ambiguities, and abstentions into explicit audit targets. Over time, typed sidecars in datasets, APIs, public records, and AI-generated documents can amortize this formalization burden into reusable infrastructure.
Junyu Ren
Jul 13, 2026cs.AI

Enhancing Query Efficiency for d-DNNF Representations Through Preprocessing

In this paper, we investigate preprocessing techniques aimed at improving the efficiency of accessing models of propositional formulas represented in conjunctive normal form (CNF). We focus on three fundamental tasks: uniform sampling, direct model access, and model enumeration. Our analysis reveals that most state-of-the-art preprocessors, when they do not preserve formula equivalence, are generally unsuitable for these tasks. In contrast, we demonstrate that preprocessors which preserve model counts can be effectively leveraged, provided relevant preprocessing information is maintained. To validate our approach, we perform extensive experiments on a diverse suite of benchmarks from multiple domains. The experimental results show that our preprocessing methods are both efficient and robust, yielding significant performance improvements for model access queries when CNF formulas are compiled into d-DNNF representations.
Jean Marie Lagniez, Emmanuel Lonca
Jul 13, 2026cs.CL

Cross-Architecture LLM Ensembles, Feature-Based Reranking and Retrieval-Augmented Prompting for Legal Information Processing

Legal information processing spans retrieval, entailment and judgment prediction problems, requiring text matching, reasoning and robust generalisation with limited supervision. We report Team DU's participation in all five tasks of COLIEE 2026, using open-weight systems for legal case retrieval, case entailment, statute retrieval and entailment, and legal judgment prediction. For Tasks 3 and 4, all models predate the 15 July 2025 cutoff required by the rules. For Task 4 (statute entailment), a cross-architecture ensemble of nine models from three families achieves 96.3% accuracy, placing first among 33 submissions from 11 teams. For the Pilot Task (tort prediction and rationale extraction), a multi-view system combining five claim-level models and refining the verdict using features derived from the claim predictions achieves 73.1% TP accuracy and 68.2% RE F1 as an unofficial submission, scoring above all official entries on TP and matching the highest on RE. For Task 2 (legal case entailment), changing only the prompt from single- to multi-selection raises F1 from 0.343 to 0.555 in post-competition evaluation on released gold labels, exceeding the best official submission (F1 = 0.490). For Task 3 (statute retrieval and entailment), replacing the entailment model with Qwen3-235B and a structured legal reasoning prompt raises accuracy from 79.3% to 91.5% in post-competition analysis. For Task 1 (legal case retrieval), a learning-to-rank system combining lexical and semantic retrieval with structural, citation authority, and temporal features (34 in total) achieves F1 = 0.314 (rank 11 of 54 submissions from 22 teams). Overall, legal information processing benefits from different inductive biases across tasks, with cross-architecture ensembling, feature-based reranking and retrieval-augmented prompting each proving most effective in different settings.
Amal Saad Alshehri, Nelly Bencomo, Amir Atapour-Abarghouei
Jul 12, 2026cs.AI

Learning Linear Temporal Specifications from Demonstrations with Uncertainty

Learning temporal logic specifications from system demonstrations is essential for tasks such as formal verification and controller synthesis, especially in safety-critical domains. Existing approaches typically assume demonstrations are correct or only affected by misclassification errors. In practice, however, system traces are often uncertain or incomplete due to sensor faults, measurement errors, or data loss. We present a framework for learning minimal Linear Temporal Logic (LTL) formulas from demonstrations with uncertainty. Our approach models uncertainty via Hamming distance to generate possible estimates around each observed trace, which are grouped with constraints requiring that at least one trace per group is consistent with the learned formula. Our problem is then reduced to an equivalent Pseudo-Boolean Optimization. We evaluate our method against state-of-the-art LTL learning approaches and show that it recovers specifications that more closely align with ground-truth formulas under uncertainty.
Parastou Fahim, Constantino Lagoa, Rômulo Meira-G'oes
Jul 12, 2026cs.AI

First-Order Modal Logic in HOL: Deep and Shallow Embeddings with Automated Faithfulness (Extended Preprint)

We extend, in Isabelle/HOL, the deep-and-shallow embedding methodology of our prior work from propositional to first-order modal logic (FML) with constant-domain Kripke semantics. Three embeddings of FML into classical higher-order logic (HOL) are provided side by side: a deep embedding, a heavyweight maximal-shallow embedding, and a lightweight minimal-shallow embedding. The minimal-shallow embedding is presented as an Isabelle/HOL locale, parametrised by an accessibility relation, a world-indexed interpretation, a universe of worlds, and a variable assignment; the locale form admits a global faithfulness theorem, stating that quantifying over all minimal-shallow interpretations recovers exactly deep validity. A central technical contribution is a mechanisation, for FML under constant-domain Kripke semantics, of the (countable) downward Löwenheim-Skolem theorem, which underpins the automation of our faithfulness proof between the deep and minimal-shallow embeddings. Deploying it inside an extension of the minimal-shallow locale resolves the surjectivity problem that arises against an uncountable domain of individuals -- where the locale's variable assignment, having countable domain V = nat, cannot be surjective onto the domain -- and thereby yields faithfulness over the full domain. Since prior work treats only the propositional fragment, we develop here the substitution machinery (free/bound-variable predicates, the fresh-variable function, capture-avoiding substitution, alphabetic renaming, the substitutability predicate, the substitution lemma, and size-based induction principles) needed for the first-order quantifiers.
Christoph Benzmüller, Daniel Kirchner
Jul 10, 2026cs.AI

L-MAD: A Systematic Evaluation of Multi-Agent Debate Structures in Legal Reasoning

While multi-agent debate (MAD) frameworks have shown significant potential in general reasoning, their effectiveness in highly structured, knowledge-heavy legal domains remains under-explored. In this work, we introduce the Legal Multi-Agent Debate (L-MAD) framework to systematically evaluate different debate structures and aggregation methods within Legal Textual Entailment. By assigning distinct expert personas to multiple agents, L-MAD improves upon strong single-agent baselines by up to 8%. Furthermore, analyzing how debate scales reveals a clear trade-off: increasing the agent population reduces inconsistency and improves accuracy, whereas extending discussion rounds induces a detrimental \textit{over-deliberation drift} where agents reinforce each other's mistakes. Ultimately, our findings outline the practical boundaries and safety margins of deploying collaborative multi-agent systems in high-stakes legal reasoning environments.
Tan-Minh Nguyen, Hoang-Trung Nguyen, Huu-Dong Nguyen +3
Jul 10, 2026quant-ph

Quantum Logic as the Logic of Contexts

Quantum logic is usually presented as a non-classical departure from ordinary reasoning forced on us by quantum mechanics, with classical logic kept as the secure starting point. We argue for the opposite order of explanation in a finite and fully computable setting. The free orthomodular lattice on two generators has ninety-six elements, the direct product of a six-element non-distributive factor and a sixteen-element Boolean factor. Reading the first factor as a register of contexts and the second as Boolean content, we obtain a calculus whose elements are context--bit-vector pairs and whose operations act component by component. With this calculus we establish three results. First, we classify the six layers by commutativity, identifying the central kernel of context-neutral propositions together with a dual central layer in which all complementary contexts are present. Second, we show that orthocomplementation rearranges the layers exactly as the complementation of the small factor rearranges its elements, which makes the duality among the layers rigid rather than accidental. Third, we prove that the operation forgetting the context is a surjective homomorphism of orthocomplemented lattices whose quotient is the classical Boolean algebra, so that classical logic is a six-to-one, information-losing image of the contextual calculus.
Haruki Emori, Atsushi Iriki, Andrei Khrennikov +1
Jul 8, 2026cs.PL

GradInf: Gradient Estimation as Probabilistic Inference

Gradient estimation -- the task of computing the gradient of the expected value of a probabilistic program -- has diverse applications in scientific computing, but is notoriously difficult because of issues such as high-dimensional integration, discrete random choices, and complex stochastic dependencies. This article introduces gradient inference, a new approach to developing sound and efficient gradient estimators for probabilistic programs. Gradient inference rests on a formal reduction from a gradient estimation problem to a closely related probabilistic inference problem, whose solution can be differentiated to obtain a gradient estimator. This inference problem is obtained by applying two powerful statistical operations -- coupling and factorization -- to the input probabilistic program. Our reduction lets us leverage the rich toolkit of probabilistic inference algorithms to design novel gradient estimators that extend and improve upon existing methods. We introduce GradInf, a probabilistic programming system that facilitates the sound and automated implementation of gradient inference. GradInf is centered around programmable source-to-source transformations for coupling and factorizing higher-order probabilistic programs, whose soundness is proven in terms of a denotational semantics. Key to our development is the use of information-flow typing to allow random choices in a probabilistic program to be factored out and partially evaluated, which improves our ability to deploy sophisticated probabilistic inference algorithms. The resulting system offers practitioners a principled framework for designing gradient estimators. We apply GradInf to several challenging case studies, showing that it can express prominent gradient estimators from the literature and enables the construction of new state-of-the-art estimators that outperform the best existing baselines.
Gaurav Arya, Mathieu Huot, Moritz Schauer +2
Jul 5, 2026cs.AI

Why Pure Reasoning is Not Enough: Nature as the Source of Mathematical Innovation

We advance the hypothesis that human mathematical reasoning, constrained by both the undecidability and the computational intractability of even modest logical fragments, relies fundamentally on pattern matching from domains external to pure deduction. The most prolific reservoir of such patterns is the natural world, whose physical laws and biological systems have undergone billions of years of ``pre-computation'' and already exhibit surprisingly innovative solutions. To ground this claim, we trace the history of the Fourier transform and relevant mathematics, from the vibrating string controversy to the hear equation and subsequent formalisms prevalent in mathematics. At each critical juncture, a physics problem forced the acceptance or creation of a mathematical tool that pure formal reasoning failed to anticipate or, worse, human reasoning had resisted. We further survey the landscape of logical complexity, from NP-hard propositional satisfiability to the non-elementary decision-procedures for monadic second-order theories, to demonstrate that even when a logic is decidable, the resources required for worst-case deduction are astronomically prohibitive. We argue that these barriers make physics-inspired pattern matching not just a historical accident but a cognitive necessity. Finally, we draw the consequence for artificial intelligence: if pure reasoning is constitutively insufficient, then any system aiming at human-level mathematical creativity must embed a vast store of cross-domain patterns rather than rely on deduction alone. This furnishes a principled justification for the enormous scale of contemporary large language models.
Charanjit S. Jutla, Vimal Sharma
Jul 3, 2026cs.AI

Applying Answer Set Programming with Fuzzy Membership Functions: a Case Study

Human reasoning often operates through qualitative concepts expressed by linguistic labels such as high, low, expensive, or cheap, whose interpretation depends on context and is usually vague, despite being rooted in numerical data. This paper explores a novel fuzzy-logic-based qualitative extension of Answer Set Programming (ASP) to bridge numerical information and qualitative reasoning. The underlying language, formally introduced in a separate work, provides a principled framework that avoids rigid thresholds and supports robust reasoning under vagueness. Focusing on a representative use case, we illustrate how the framework integrates numerically grounded inputs (such as outputs of machine learning models) with symbolic reasoning over qualitative labels. Key features, including learning-based membership functions and semantically enriched predicates, enable the combination of expert knowledge, contextual factors, and subjective interpretations within a unified declarative setting.
Luca Ferragina, Ilenia Galati, Lorena Gullone +1
Jul 2, 2026cs.LG

Role-Aware Neural Convex Divergence Heads for Asymmetric Representation Learning

Many representation learning problems involve directed relations, such as lexical entailment, sentence entailment, ontology hierarchy, and citation links. Standard Euclidean, cosine, and Mahalanobis heads are symmetric, while generic neural scorers can model directionality but provide limited geometric structure. This paper proposes a role-aware neural convex divergence head for asymmetric representation learning. The head applies source- and target-role projections before evaluating an input-convex neural Bregman divergence, yielding a nonnegative structured score in the role-projected space. We characterize its projected-space identity, source-role convexity, directional-gap decomposition, and Hessian-based local curvature. Experiments on lexical, sentence, ontology, and directed graph benchmarks compare symmetric distances, unstructured asymmetric scorers, order/hyperbolic baselines, plain ICNN-Bregman heads, and the proposed role-aware variant. Across ten random seeds on the main semantic and ontology benchmarks, role-aware projections consistently improve directional accuracy over plain ICNN-Bregman heads while preserving zero observed negative divergence rate. The results also identify a boundary case: on large fixed-feature citation prediction, specialized symmetric or hyperbolic baselines remain stronger in ranking accuracy. Overall, the proposed head is best understood as a structured and interpretable plug-in distance module for tasks where directional relations matter.
He Huang, Lu Shen, Yunfeng Huang +1
Jul 2, 2026cs.LO

ADVENT: LLM-Driven Automatic Predicate Invention for ILP

Predicate invention (PI), the creation of new predicates to extend the hypothesis space, remains a critical bottleneck in Inductive Logic Programming (ILP). Existing methods rely on domain expertise and produce semantically opaque predicates, hindering adaptation to unfamiliar domains and cross-task reuse. We present ADVENT, an LLM-driven PI mechanism for ILP. ADVENT pairs LLM abductive generation with Prolog deductive verification, forming an iterative loop in which concrete execution results guide the LLM to refine candidate predicates. The mechanism leverages Large Language Models to identify implicit patterns in structured relational data and invent auxiliary predicates with meaningful names and definitions. Invented predicates and learned rules accumulate in a knowledge pool for cross-task reuse. Experiments on nine poker-hand concepts across seven LLMs show that LLM-driven PI achieves 58% success rate where ILP alone fails entirely, formal verification raises this to 80%, and the knowledge pool yields gains up to +31 percentage points, while producing human-interpretable rules. These results suggest that ADVENT offers a promising direction for automating predicate invention and enabling cross-task knowledge reuse in ILP.
Tingting Yu, Pei-Cing Huang, Chan Hsu +2
Jul 1, 2026cs.CL

Faithful by Definition: Emotion Analysis via Natural Semantic Metalanguage Explications

Explanations for emotion classifiers are usually produced post hoc, with no guarantee that they reflect the computation behind the label. We present an explication interface for event-based emotion analysis. A parser maps the input text to an explication, a short script in the closed vocabulary of Natural Semantic Metalanguage organized into twelve typed slots, and a fixed decision list of rules transcribed from published semantic definitions computes the label from the explication alone. The faithfulness guarantee is therefore causal and definitional, while all empirical risk lives in the learned parser, which the per-line entailment interface makes auditable against the input. On crowd-sourced event descriptions, our fine-tuned parser reaches 0.33 accuracy and 0.48 selective accuracy on a small held-out set, suggesting that the interface trades insignificant accuracy difference to a black-box model for a verifiable, inspectable decision basis for first-person event-based emotion analysis. We also release EmoExpl-1200 with per-line verification metadata and the full rule set.
Frank Xing, Erik Cambria
Jun 30, 2026cs.LO

Inquisitive Action Logic

We introduce inquisitive action logic, InqAL, a multi-agent modal logic for reasoning about action. While traditional approaches focus on what properties of the outcome an agent can force, InqAL also captures what aspects of the outcome an agent determines through their actions. As we argue, such claims of agentive determination are naturally analyzed as modal claims involving questions. Technically, InqAL is a multi-agent extension of inquisitive neighborhood logic based on concurrent game structures. With respect to statements, it is expressively equivalent to the individual-agent fragment of the socially friendly coalition logic recently proposed by Goranko and Enqvist. We present an axiomatization of InqAL and prove completeness and decidability via the finite model property. Along the way, we establish a representation theorem for actual effectivity functions, associating to an agent the sets of outcomes corresponding to their possible actions; we give exact conditions under which a multi-agent neighborhood frame arises from a concurrent game structure.
Ivano Ciardelli
Jun 30, 2026cs.LO

Belief Contraction in Dynamic Epistemic Logic

Dynamic epistemic logic represents belief change via model transformations induced by epistemic events. Its standard formulation (Baltag, Moss, Solecki, 1998) provides a natural account of belief expansion through the elimination of possibilities, but it cannot model belief contraction about factual propositions. A classic response enriches Kripke models with plausibility orderings, representing contraction as an update that promotes certain possibilities over others. We show that this approach has expressive limitations. In particular, the approach cannot model belief that violates positive introspection and contraction dynamics in response to a hedged public announcement that phi might be false. Motivated by these considerations, we introduce a mechanism for belief contraction defined directly on standard Kripke models, without any constraints on the doxastic accessibility relation. We show that it satisfies some of the standard properties of belief contraction but not others, study the conditions under which contraction may be unsuccessful, and provide a sound and complete axiomatization of the logic via reduction axioms. We also define a more general dynamic logic that is an extension of standard DEL and accommodates belief contractions due to events such as private or semi-private announcements, and provide a complete and sound axiomatization of the general logic.
Gaia Belardinelli, Snow Zhang
Jun 30, 2026cs.LO

The Logic of Data Access and Data Exchanges

We investigate a new logic that extends Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL), by combining standard epistemic modalities for (individual and distributed) propositional knowledge with operators for (conditional) non-propositional knowledge of a number (in which an agent or a group have knowledge of the value of some variable x, conditional on some additional information). We also generalize these operators, by considering formulas that express the fact that an agent or group can (conditionally) narrow down the possible values of the variable x to at most N possibilities (for some natural number N). In order to name and compare such hypothetical values, we extend the logic further with definite descriptions based on minimization operators, denoting the least of the N possible values of x (according to some fixed order) that are considered possible by the agent or group. On this static base, we consider DEL-style extensions with dynamic modalities for general 'data-exchange events' (covering private and public propositional announcements, but also secret hacking of a private database, or public sharing of one's data via open-source repositories, etc.). In such scenarios, whole 'chunks' of information may be exchanged or modified: once access to a given source is gained, all the 'data' stored at that specific location becomes available. We give complete axiomatizations for the resulting logics, and prove their decidability and co-expressivity.
Alexandru Baltag, Sonja Smets
Jun 30, 2026cs.LO

Resolving Asynchronous Distributed Knowledge

There are by now various epistemic modal logics with intersection modalities for distributed knowledge and intersection update modalities for dynamic phenomena like agents sharing (all their) information, agents receiving information from other agents, and full information protocols. One of those is the logic of Resolving Distributed Knowledge, by Agotnes and Wang. It has distributed knowledge modalities for arbitrary subsets of the set of all agents and it also has so-called resolution modalities for arbitrary subsets of agents sharing their knowledge. In that logic, the agents not involved in the knowledge sharing are aware of the agents sharing knowledge, agents are memory-less, and the kind of dynamics represents synchronous updates, where there is common awareness of the global clock. In contrast, in this contribution we present a logic for Resolving Asynchronous Distributed Knowledge. It is an asynchronous generalization of the synchronous logic of resolving distributed knowledge. The logical semantics is history-based: truth is not only with respect to a given world in a model, but also with respect to a given history of prior resolutions, of which each individual agent can only observe a part. In particular, an agent is unaware of resolutions for groups of agents not including her. As is to be expected, this comes with many technical complications, for example concerning the axiomatization. The synchronous axioms relating resolution to distributed knowledge are now invalid. The modelling advantages of such an asynchronous novel logic, for distributed computing and similar areas, are however substantial and a major asset.
Philippe Balbiani, Hans van Ditmarsch, Clara Lerouvillois
Jun 30, 2026cs.LG

Calibration, Not Compilation: Detecting and Repairing Misspecified Probabilistic Programs Written by Language Models

Language models increasingly write probabilistic programs (in NumPyro, Stan, or Pyro), but a program that compiles, runs, and passes every unit test can still be \emph{statistically} wrong -- a Gaussian likelihood for heavy-tailed data, a Poisson for over-dispersed counts, an invalid prior support, or a pathological parameterization. The right verifier is therefore not a test suite but the Bayesian workflow itself: posterior predictive checks, simulation-based calibration, sampler diagnostics (R^\hat R, divergences, ESS), and held-out predictive density. We study this calibration oracle along three axes. \textbf{Detection:} on a benchmark of 1414 misspecification types across 1010 model families (200200 instances), it flags the bug with AUC 0.970.97 (88%88\% at 2%2\% FPR \emph{when handed the correct reference program, an upper bound}) -- and a fully \emph{reference-free} version that uses no correct program reaches 6262--78%78\% (the upper figure from a small automated model search), versus 0%0\% for a unit-test oracle. \textbf{Repair:} used as feedback in an LLM repair loop across fifteen models, calibration significantly outperforms unit-test feedback -- which is itself \emph{significantly worse than no feedback at all}, a passing test inducing false confidence that suppresses repair -- and improves over no feedback on strong-but-unsaturated models (GPT-5.1 33→92%33{\to}92\%, Claude 75→100%75{\to}100\%; paired McNemar, n=228n{=}228). \textbf{Reality:} on programs LLMs write from scratch for neutral briefs, 1515--47%47\% of runnable ones are statistically misspecified (unit tests catch none), and calibration-guided repair significantly beats LLM-as-judge review, a Bayesian-workflow checklist, and data-summary self-debug. Across all three, the lesson is the same: for probabilistic programs, correctness is calibration, not compilation.
Jian Xu, Delu Zeng, John Paisley +1
Jun 29, 2026cs.CL

From Propositional to Perceptual Asymmetry: Extending Frictive Policy Optimization to Asymmetric Partial Information Dialogue

Frictive Policy Optimization (FPO; Pustejovsky et al., 2025) treats friction in collaborative dialogue -- misalignment, misunderstanding, repair -- as an epistemic signal essential to common-ground construction, rather than noise to be minimized. However, FPO and its implementations assume shared perceptual contexts, where friction arises from differently interpreted propositions over the same scene, which we define as propositional asymmetry. We extend FPO to perceptual asymmetry, where participants hold asymmetric partial information and the same referring expression yields different denotations depending on whose information state grounds the reference. We evaluate this through cross-corpora analysis and LLM probing on referentially asymmetric dialogue tasks, primarily the HCRC MapTask (Anderson et al., 1991). We find that FPO's friction functional is empirically valid only when evaluated from within each participant's information horizon: different landmark configurations produce qualitatively distinct grounding failure modes, with a small class of ambiguous configurations driving a disproportionate share of misunderstandings through trajectories that appear successful but silently diverge. The LLM probe confirms that having the "right perspective" matters more than having all perspectives: the informed single viewpoint outperforms omniscient access to both participants' contexts. We propose two annotation refinements: subtype decomposition of pending grounding states and accommodation-aware alignment classification.
Yifan Zhu, Kyeongmin Rim, James Pustejovsky
Jun 27, 2026cs.AI

Self-Supervised Theorem Discovery in a Formal Axiomatic System

Recent artificial intelligence (AI) systems have shown remarkable progress in mathematical reasoning. Many existing approaches, including large language models (LLMs), draw on human prior knowledge in the form of mathematical text, code, or theorem libraries. Although these approaches are highly effective in practice, it remains an open question whether an agent can autonomously discover useful theorems without such human priors. We study this question in a formal axiomatic system by developing an agent that starts from axioms and inference rules alone and gradually grows a library of useful theorems. Concretely, we propose a self-supervised theorem-discovery algorithm that alternates between proof search and useful-theorem extraction, building a theorem library whose entries are reused as lemmas for subsequent proof search. Experiments show that the agent discovers tens of thousands of theorems and finds proofs for human-written benchmark problems, suggesting that its discoveries include theorems meaningful from a human mathematical perspective. Furthermore, the discovered theorems improve LLM proof performance when provided as prompt lemmas, indicating that they can serve as external knowledge for LLM reasoning. Our results provide evidence that useful theorems can emerge from proof search without relying on human-provided theorem libraries. More broadly, they suggest a path toward self-evolving AI systems for mathematics whose discoveries remain formally verifiable.
Kazuki Ota, Takayuki Osa, Tatsuya Harada
Jun 27, 2026cs.CV

LogiCo: A Unified Framework for Logical and Structural Anomaly Detection

Current anomaly detection methods primarily focus on structural anomalies, while paying insufficient attention to anomalies that violate logical constraints. Conversely, top-performing logical anomaly detection approaches address this by modeling global semantic consistency, but perform poorly on subtle structural anomalies due to inadequate detection granularity. In this paper, we propose LogiCo, a unified framework for Logical and structural anomaly detection via Component-level feature reconstruction. Unlike existing methods that rely on explicit global semantic modeling, LogiCo employs a novel component-level feature reconstruction technique to capture inter-component logical constraints. Specifically, LogiCo maps pre-trained image features into a discrete component-level feature space and performs collaborative feature reconstruction at both component and patch levels, enabling it to effectively detect both logical and structural anomalies. Furthermore, to address the specific challenge of count-related logical anomalies, we integrate a segmentation-map discriminator that extends the model's capability to identify quantitative inconsistencies. LogiCo achieves state-of-the-art performance on both logical and structural anomaly detection across four benchmarks, including MVTec-LOCO, MVTec-AD, VisA, and Real-IAD, demonstrating its superiority and practical feasibility. The code is available at https://github.com/cnulab/LogiCo.
Ximiao Zhang, Min Xu, Xiuzhuang Zhou
Jun 26, 2026cs.LG

Geometric Measurements of the Axiom of Choice in Neural Proof Embeddings

The axiom of choice has divided the foundations of mathematics for over a century, but the distinction between classical and constructive proofs has remained a philosophical and methodological one. We use Lean 4's kernel-level tracking of axiom dependence to show that the axiom of choice has a measurable geometric correlate in proof space that obeys a one-parameter mixture law and has operational consequences for neural theorem provers. To do this, we partition 471,260471{,}260 declarations of Mathlib by transitive dependence on the axiom of choice and represent a filtered population of 42,35542{,}355 traced theorems by their sequences of tactic invocations. We use the constructive proofs in this dataset to train a self-supervised proof encoder and show that when using it to measure classical proofs, three complementary measurements (anomaly score, reconstruction loss, and density-superlevel containment) exhibit a common decline with the proof's distance from the axiom in the dependency graph, from sharp separation at the shallow boundary (AUC 0.8470.847 at distance 22) to indistinguishability at distance~9+9{+}. Robustness controls show that the signature survives length, file, author, and topic controls, and replicates under full-source encoders trained on normalised proof source. Operationally, we show that on an evaluation sample of 251251 Mathlib theorems, Lean's \texttt{aesop} tactic solves constructive theorems at 13×13\times the rate of classical ones, and a neural-guided hybrid using the ReProver tactic generator compresses the gap to 5×5\times. The geometric anomaly score predicts \texttt{aesop} failure beyond proof length, providing an operational link between the geometric signature and prover performance.
Rodrigo Mendoza-Smith
Jun 25, 2026cs.CL

Beyond Logical Forms: LLM-Extracted Patterns for Fallacy Classification

In today's fast-paced information era, logical fallacies, defined as defective patterns of reasoning, inevitably contribute to the growth of information disorder. However, often fallacies appear in nuanced forms that complicate automated classification. In this study, we investigate whether merging abstract logical structures with context-level linguistic cues proves beneficial for fallacy classification, developing a framework that inductively extracts such patterns from fallacious examples and their explanations using Large Language Models (LLMs). We evaluate the impact of these patterns across different LLMs and experimental zero- and one-shot configurations, showing statistically significant improvements over zero-shot baselines and outperforming competing approaches. Cross-dataset experiments validate generalization, establishing data-driven pattern extraction as an effective method for generating logical representations.
Eleni Papadopulos, Firoj Alam, Giovanni Da San Martino
Jun 25, 2026cs.CV

LogicIR: Logic Gate Networks for Image Restoration

Image restoration aims to reconstruct high-quality images from degraded low-quality inputs. As the computational demands of image restoration models continue to rise, there is growing interest in lightweight architectures optimized for fast and efficient inference. Logic gate networks (LGNs), which operate using fundamental logic operations such as NAND and XOR, have recently emerged as a promising direction for achieving highly efficient computation. However, their potential remains largely untapped in the domain of image restoration. In this work, we introduce LogicIR, the first LGN specifically designed for image restoration tasks. LogicIR incorporates a UNet-inspired architecture composed entirely of logic gates. In addition, we propose a differentiable bit decoding layer and an index shuffling mechanism that improves information propagation across logic gates. Experimental results across multiple image restoration benchmarks demonstrate that LogicIR achieves strong performance with significantly reduced computational cost, establishing LogicIR as a viable and efficient alternative for image restoration. The source code is available at https://github.com/jimmy9704/LogicIR
Hongjae Lee, Myungjun Son, Jaeseong Yu +1
Jun 25, 2026cs.AI

Radical AI Interpretability

We develop a framework for interpreting AI systems as agents, drawing on the philosophical tradition of radical interpretation and the tools of mechanistic interpretability. The core question is: given the computational facts about a system, how do we solve for its beliefs, desires, and meanings? This matters increasingly for safety. We want to be able to trust the systems we deploy, whether by understanding their goals or, more modestly, by reliably detecting deception. Interpretability researchers are building tools to read beliefs and desires off a model's internals, but there is no settled account of when such a tool has succeeded. This book supplies one. We propose criteria on both representationalist and interpretationist approaches, and tie each to tests current interpretability methods can carry out. A central lesson is that these attributions cannot be made piecemeal. Beliefs, desires, and the propositional structure they presuppose are jointly constrained, and a method that fixes one while measuring the others inherits whatever distortions that introduces. This holism becomes pressing for AI systems, which may not share the interpreter's concepts. However, it also provides leverage: a system's attitudes constrain its propositional structure, that structure constrains which attitudes can be attributed, and mechanistic interpretability can help us measure both.
Daniel A. Herrmann, Benjamin A. Levinstein
Jun 24, 2026econ.TH

Measurable Majorities Are Not Finitely Axiomatizable

This theoretical note studies the finite axiomatizability of strict majority reasoning in finite social decision frames. Moss and Pedersen (2026) <doi: 10.48550/arXiv.2606.23853> introduce a coherence criterion that characterizes exactly when qualitative majority judgments are representable by a finitely additive measure. The question addressed here is whether that coherence criterion can be replaced, in the finite setting, by any bounded finite fragment. We prove that it cannot. For every k≥1k\ge 1, we construct a maximal standard frame whose shortest coherence violation has length exactly 2k+22k+2. Hence there is no uniform finite bound on the incoherence index of social decision frames, resolving Conjecture 5.7 stated by Moss and Pedersen (2026). The construction is geometric, in the sense that it proceeds via orthogonality and dimension in rational vector spaces, and self-contained: it isolates a symmetric family of half-sized voting blocs and extends it to a maximal frame in which every shorter balanced obstruction is excluded. Along the explicit infinite sequence of universe sizes obtained in the construction, this also establishes the middle-layer family predicted by Conjecture B.25 by Moss and Pedersen (2026). Together with the soundness and completeness theorem for the Moss-Pedersen minimal logic for strict majorities, this establishes that measurable social decision frames are not finitely axiomatizable in that language.
Lawrence S. Moss, Arthur Paul Pedersen
Jun 23, 2026cs.AI

Cost-Optimal Decision Diagrams for Stochastic Boolean Function Evaluation

In many decision-making scenarios, acquiring information incurs different costs. We consider the problem of constructing a deterministic evaluation strategy that minimizes the expected cost of evaluating a propositional formula under variable costs and a probability distribution over truth assignments. We present a branch-and-bound algorithm with variable-selection heuristics, pruning, and caching. To the best of our knowledge, it is the first practical exact algorithm for this level of generality. Experiments on random instances demonstrate scalability and quantify the efficiency-quality trade-off of a greedy beam-search variant. We additionally evaluate a structured heart-disease diagnosis instance. Finally, we prove that the problem is #P\#P-hard and contained in PSPACE\mathrm{PSPACE}.
Xia Zong, Tuomo Lehtonen, Jussi Rintanen
Jun 23, 2026cs.LO

What Does ODRL Mean? A Cross-Level Ontological Grounding of Permissions, Prohibitions, and Duties in UFO-L

ODRL policy evaluators produce verdicts, but say nothing about the normative positions a policy brings into existence, the authority structures those positions presuppose, or who holds the power to declare a norm violated. We formulate the Cross-Level Design Principle: any normative language with violable, consequential norms requires both conduct-level positions (Permission, Duty, Right, No right) and competence-level positions (Power, Subjection, Immunity, Disability). Applying this to ODRL, we establish that prohibition is sanctioned (violation possible and consequential), that permission is underspecified across its behaviour parameter (open vs. closed world), and that the formal semantics covers achievement obligations only. We ground ODRL in UFO-L, mapping each activated rule to a simple legal relator and extending coverage from two to eight legal positions; violation-declaration authority, implicit in every existing evaluator, becomes an explicit Power-Subjection pair. All axioms are mechanically verified in Isabelle/HOL and across a 39-problem benchmark under Vampire, E, and Z3.
Daham M. Mustafa, Christoph Lange, Giancarlo Guizzardi +3
Jun 23, 2026cs.SE

AutoSpec: Safety Rule Evolution for LLM Agents via Inductive Logic Programming

Large language model (LLM) agents increasingly automate complex tasks by integrating language models with external tools and environments. However, their autonomy poses significant safety risks: agents may execute destructive commands, leak sensitive data, or violate domain constraints. Existing safety approaches face a fundamental tradeoff: hand-crafted rules are interpretable but brittle, with overly conservative rules blocking safe operations (high false positives) while permissive rules miss unsafe behaviors (high false negatives). Neural classifiers lack the interpretability required for safety-critical deployments. We present AutoSpec, a framework that automatically evolves deployed expert-designed safety rules from user safe/unsafe annotations through counterexample-guided inductive synthesis (CEGIS) guided by inductive logic programming (ILP). Starting from the expert rules and a stream of annotated traces, AutoSpec iteratively evaluates rules, mines false-positive and false-negative counterexamples, uses ILP to learn which predicates discriminate them, generates candidate rule edits, and verifies candidates to select the best revision. The key insight is that ILP efficiently identifies predicates that appear frequently in false negatives but rarely in false positives (or vice versa), dramatically pruning the exponential search space of rule edits. This continues until convergence, producing interpretable rules that balance precision and recall. We evaluate AutoSpec on 291 execution traces spanning code execution and embodied agent domains. AutoSpec raises rule F1 to 0.98 and 0.93 across the two domains, achieving up to 94% false positive reduction while maintaining high recall, and converges within 4-5 iterations. The ILP-guided approach achieves up to 4.8x higher F1 than heuristic CEGIS. The learned rules are human-readable, auditable, and generalize to unseen scenarios.
Pingchuan Ma, Zhaoyu Wang, Zimo Ji +5
Jun 22, 2026cs.CL

Does My Embedding Reflect That A=BA = B? Evaluating Mathematical Equivalence in Embedding Models

Because mathematics is highly abstract, a single statement can take very different forms depending on what subfield it is framed in. There are many examples where breakthroughs occurred after researchers discovered that a question had already been answered in a different field. At the same time, the growth of new resources related to formalization has increased the need for tools that enable efficient and reliable navigation between mathematical 'languages' (e.g., from Lean to natural language). In this paper, we investigate whether current embedding models capture mathematical equivalence. To do this, we introduce the Mathematically Equivalent but Lexically Different Pairs (MELD) Dataset, a collection of mathematically equivalent statements that are expressed in very different language. We show that current state-of-the-art embedding models tend to group statements by the terminology used to make them instead of the underlying math. Motivated by this, we propose a contrastive approach to learning embeddings of mathematical text that focuses on aligning informal statements with different formalizations. Our experiments demonstrate that this leads to improvements not only on informal-formal retrieval tasks but also on MELD, which only contains natural language statements.
Jiaying Ye, Samarth Rao, Leo Carlin +9
Jun 22, 2026econ.TH

The Measurable Majority

This paper studies strict majority reasoning in finite electorates using so-called social decision frames\textit{social decision frames}: finite sets of voters equipped with distinguished families of coalitions interpreted as those voting blocs evaluated to form a strict majority. A coherence criterion for qualitative majority judgments is identified and shown to give an exact characterization for representability of strict majorities by finitely additive measures. In addition, a minimal natural logic for reasoning about strict majorities is shown to be sound and complete. These developments motivate examination of associated combinatorial questions concerning incoherence in finite families of sets; partial results and a conjecture are given. Finally, the results of this paper are applied to correct a classical representation theorem for weak qualitative probability structures due to Patrick Suppes and to establish a May-type characterization for ordinary strict majority rule for social decision frames.
Lawrence S. Moss, Arthur Paul Pedersen
Jun 21, 2026cs.CV

Gold Points Sniper: Self-guided Visual Reasoning in VLM for Fine-grained Action Understanding

Robots operating in everyday environments must understand fine-grained human actions, intentions, and contextual cues from broad views where people occupy only small regions, a capability unmet by current systems. While open-vocabulary action recognition methods remain limited to assigning predefined labels, and vision-language models (VLMs) face an inherent trade-off between informational richness and factual fidelity in their outputs, neither approach achieves the deep semantic interpretation required for reliable human-robot interaction. We propose Gold Points Sniper (GPS), a novel framework that empowers lightweight VLMs with self-guided multimodal reasoning capabilities for fine-grained human action understanding. Our approach comprises three key modules: Gold Points Extractor trains VLMs to identify critical action-relevant details, Selective Socratic Questioner validates and refines these details through selective self-questioning, and Semantic Entailment Evaluator quantitatively assesses factual consistency using semantic entailment classification. Extensive experiments on our curated instruction-tuning dataset based on the CAP benchmark demonstrate that GPS-enhanced lightweight VLMs achieve substantial performance improvements, with some models reaching performance comparable to proprietary GPT-4o while maintaining superior factual accuracy. Our work establishes a reliable foundation for fine-grained action understanding in domestic robotics, enabling robots to safely interpret human behavior through information-dense yet factually grounded descriptions. Source code, training configurations, annotation prompts, and dataset details are released at https://github.com/Haodi-Liu/GPS-Gold-Point-Sniper.
Haodi Liu, Xinhang Yang, Kunda Yan +3
Jun 18, 2026cs.AI

Study on Quantitative Dynamic Epistemic Logic for Belief Revision

Belief revision is a process in which an agent begins to believe in something she previously did not. I begin the paper by presenting, based on (Gärdenfors, 1998; Hansson, 1999), postulates for belief revision that constitute the basis of the AGM theory. I will then briefly show the semantics of a modal logic introduced in (van Ditmarsch, 2005), which I call $P$'. This logic formalizes static epistemic states and has greater expressive power than AGM in doing so because it captures the quantitative notion of "degrees of conviction". The third step is to introduce revision operators on $P$ and, mostly following (van Ditmarsch, 2005), obtain the Dynamic Epistemic Logic (DEL) I call P∗P*'. It models processes of belief revision in several ways. Original results are presented in the following two sections. The first one of these sections revolves around a formalization of AGM postulates within P∗P* by proving some theorems related to the satisfaction of those postulates by revisions defined in P∗P*. The last section features an analysis of P∗P*'s revisions that go beyond the mere satisfaction of postulates. I compare their formal behavior with respect to some philosophical criteria. At last, I conclude that the functions presented in (van Ditmarsch, 2005) are not good formalizations of the philosophical intuition behind AGM. Instead, it is captured by the function ∗0*^0 originally defined in this paper (but highly inspired by (van Benthem, 2007)). An implementation of this function is also provided.
Felipe Nunes de Souza Camargo
Jun 18, 2026cs.AI

DeepSWIP: Quotient-WMC Counterfactuals for Neural Probabilistic Logic Programs

Neurosymbolic systems such as DeepProbLog combine neural perception with probabilistic logic, but standard inference is associational. Counterfactual reasoning additionally requires a causal semantics for interventions and evidence. We introduce DeepSWIP, a single-world counterfactual semantics for DeepProbLog programs. Using neural materialization, we reduce fixed-context neural predicates to ordinary ProbLog choices, apply Single World Intervention Programs (SWIPs), and compute counterfactuals by weighted model counting (WMC) over a single transformed program. Under finite grounding and unique-supported-model assumptions, DeepSWIP is exact relative to the learned materialized FCM. The standard quotient-WMC form of ProbLog conditionals identifies active neural probabilities and explains intervention cleaning, calibration sensitivity, and rare-evidence instability. Experiments on MPI3D confirm the transformation against a DeepTwin construction against 12,000 queries, as predicted and a 2.14×\times inference speedup from avoiding the Twin's endogenous duplication. A SUMO HOV experiment shows that neural calibration degradation biases plug-in estimates, while a correctly scoped randomized-policy AIPW estimator removes most first-order bias for population mean and ATE estimands. Code is at https://github.com/saibib/deep_SWIP.
Saimun Habib, Vaishak Belle, Fengxiang He
Jun 18, 2026cs.AI

QMFOL: Benchmarking Large Language Model Reasoning via Quantifiable Monadic First-Order Logic Test Case Generation

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant progress in reasoning, particularly in deductive reasoning, which is crucial for high-stakes decision-making. As models improve, evaluation benchmarks should evolve to keep pace. However, existing benchmarks lack fine-grained control over logical complexity and struggle to balance semantic diversity with logical consistency. To address these issues, we propose QMFOL, an automated framework for generating monadic first-order logic reasoning tasks with quantifiable and controllable complexity. It constructs formal logical structures using conjunction and disjunction patterns, enabling precise control over reasoning depth, width, label types, and distractors. These structures are then translated into natural language via LLMs, with logical consistency ensured through round-trip verification using an external prover. Based on our framework, we build QMFOLBench, a benchmark comprising 2880 instances with 960 configurations across diverse logical and semantic dimensions. Evaluations on six large reasoning models (LRMs) and two LLMs show that performance degrades and computational overhead increases with rising logical complexity. Models perform better on True-labeled tasks than on False or Unknown ones, and exhibit sensitivity to semantic variation. Overall, QMFOL offers a scalable and reliable approach for constructing deductive reasoning benchmarks with controllable complexity, enabling more precise evaluation of reasoning capabilities in modern language models.
Xinyi Zheng, Ling Shi, Tianlong Yu +3
Jun 18, 2026cs.CL

CREDENCE: Claim Reduction for Decomposition & Enhanced Credibility -- Semantic Metrics and Convergence Analysis

Decomposing compound sentences into atomic, verifiable claims is a prerequisite for reliable automated fact-checking. Prior work has relied on token-overlap (Jaccard) metrics that systematically underestimate decomposition quality for paraphrastic claims, and has lacked formal termination analysis for the repair loop. We present Credence, a revised claim decomposition and evaluation framework addressing both shortcomings. Our contributions are: (1) Semantic-F1: we use BGE-large cosine similarity fidelity metric that resolves Jaccard's penalisation and improves downstream fact-checking accuracy; (2) Convergence theorems: we formally characterise four properties of the repair pipeline, establishing that rule-based repair is monotone and finitely terminating under an oracle parser assumption; LLM-based self-repair is provably non-monotone and requires an early-exit guard; (3) Three evaluation benchmarks spanning social-media, encyclopaedic, and news domains for cross-domain generalisation measurement; (4) Multi-model benchmarking across four decomposer models (3.8B-12B) and a closed API model. Experiments on SocialClaimSplit, WikiSplitBench, and ClaimDecompBench show that Semantic-F1 outperforms Jaccard-F1 by +15-32pp. EPR ranges from 0.94 to 1.00 on SocialClaimSplit and WikiSplitBench, while ClaimDecompBench includes lower base EPR cases (down to 0.824) due to harder news-domain constructions, and rule-repair reduces the Atomicity Violation Rate (AVR) by 47-100% relative to the base model without degrading fidelity.
Phuong Huu Vu Tran, Thuan Duc Mai, Bach Xuan Le
Jun 17, 2026cs.RO

pdSTL: Probabilistic Differentiable Signal Temporal Logic for Stochastic Systems

Autonomous robots operating in uncertain environments must satisfy complex temporal and safety specifications despite stochastic dynamics and sensing noise. While Signal Temporal Logic (STL) offers robustness measures for gradient-based optimization, existing extensions either lack differentiability or ignore belief-space uncertainty. We introduce pdSTL (probabilistic differentiable Signal Temporal Logic), a framework that unifies probabilistic semantics with differentiable robustness over belief trajectories. pdSTL employs interval-valued probabilistic semantics to compute conservative satisfaction bounds, propagated compositionally through the STL syntax tree. We formulate the temporal robustness evaluation as a recurrent, LSTM-style unfolding of STL operators, enabling linear-time, differentiable monitoring suitable for end-to-end trajectory optimization. We validate pdSTL on simulated obstacle avoidance, lane-change maneuvers, and real-world Crazyflie quadcopter flight experiments under aerodynamic disturbances. Results demonstrate that pdSTL achieves efficient optimization with formal probabilistic guarantees, significantly outperforming deterministic differentiable STL in maintaining safety margins under real-world uncertainty.
Bennett Dogbey, Hemanth Manjunatha
Jun 17, 2026cs.CL

VeriBound: PAC-Bayesian Generalization Bounds for Process Reward Models Trained with Formal Verification Tools

Process Reward Models (PRMs) provide step-level verification for Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning, yet their training data acquisition remains a bottleneck: human annotation is costly and Monte Carlo roll-out estimates are noisy. A recent approach, FOVER, trains PRMs on step-level error labels automatically annotated by formal verification tools such as Z3 and Isabelle, and empirically observes cross-task generalization from symbolic tasks to diverse reasoning benchmarks. However, this generalization phenomenon lacks any theoretical explanation, and no formal bounds exist on the generalization error, sample complexity, convergence rate, or downstream Best-of-K performance of such PRMs. We propose VeriBound, a theoretical framework that provides PAC-Bayesian generalization bounds for PRMs trained with formal verification tools. We establish four main results: (i) a PAC-Bayesian generalization bound that relates the empirical verification error on formal-verification-annotated training data to the expected error on unseen reasoning tasks, with the bound depending on the formal verification accuracy and the divergence between training and test task distributions; (ii) a sample complexity result showing that O(dlog⁡(d/δ)/ε2)O(d \log(d/δ) / ε^2) formal-verification-annotated examples suffice to achieve generalization error εε with probability 1−δ1-δ, where dd is the complexity of the PRM hypothesis class; (iii) a convergence analysis proving that PRM training with formal verification labels converges at a linear rate under LL-smoothness and bounded variance conditions; and (iv) an error propagation bound that relates step-level verification error to Best-of-K performance degradation.
Amirul Rahman, Mohammed Sabih Alsharari
Jun 17, 2026cs.AI

NeSyCat Torch: A Differentiable Tensor Implementation of Categorical Semantics for Neurosymbolic Learning

Neurosymbolic semantics is fragmented: classical, fuzzy, probabilistic and neural systems each define truth by their own inductive rules. NeSyCat, extending ULLER, subsumes them under a single inductive definition of truth, parametric in a strong monad and an aggregation structure on truth-values. NeSyCat has so far lacked an account of predicates and functions learned by neural networks. We provide NeSyCat Torch as the missing link and interpret computational symbols via neural networks, implementing the framework in probabilistic programming and tensor-based backends. We use the distribution monad for reference semantics and metric evaluation, and complement it by a monad for numerically stable, differentiable training: the lazy log-tensor monad over the log-semiring. For efficient training in batches, we furthermore employ a batch monad. The axioms are the source code: written once in monad-based do-notation, monadic bind performs marginalisation, lazily pruning unneeded branches. On MNIST addition, our HaskTorch, JAX, and PyTorch implementations outperform LTN and DeepProbLog in speed and accuracy, while achieving nearly the accuracy of DeepStochLog. However, unlike DeepStochLog, we stay in a uniform framework that applies to many first-order NeSy approaches. Namely, the construction is parametric in the monad; instantiating it with, e.g., the Giry monad extends the approach to continuous probability (working out a neural representation here is left for future work).
Daniel Romero Schellhorn, Till Mossakowski, Björn Gehrke
Jun 17, 2026cs.LO

The More the Merrier: Combining Properties for ABox Abduction under Repair Semantics in ELbot

Abduction is a central approach to explain missing entailments from a knowledge base by providing a hypothesis, that would, if added to the knowledge base, make the missing entailment become true. Abduction under repair semantics has recently been investigated in detail, where several desirable properties and optimality criteria were considered, such as signature-restrictions and minimality in size and of introduced conflicts. Naturally, hypotheses that satisfy more than one of these properties or combine a property with an optimality criterion would be even more desirable for applications. So far, such hypotheses have not been investigated in the literature. In the present paper, we consider the ABox abduction problem for hypotheses satisfying more than one property or additional optimality criteria, for EL_bot under brave and AR semantics. Our main observation is that often requiring additional properties for hypotheses does not lead to an increase of complexity.
Anselm Haak, Patrick Koopmann, Yasir Mahmood +1
Jun 16, 2026cs.AI

Structural Preservation and the Logical Expressiveness of Graph Neural Networks

Bridges between graph neural networks (GNNs) and logical formalisms have been established by fixing architectural choices, such as the types of aggregation, combination, and activation functions. These choices define restricted classes of GNNs for which tight correspondences with logical formalisms can be obtained, by showing that logical formulae can be translated into equivalent GNNs and, conversely, that GNNs can be translated into equivalent formulae. In this paper we take a semantic perspective by establishing the logical expressiveness of classes of GNN classifiers that are preserved under structural properties: embeddings (extensions), injective homomorphisms, and homomorphisms. We show that, for each such property, there exists a fragment of graded modal logic characterising the class of GNNs. In particular, preservation under embeddings, injective homomorphisms, and homomorphisms corresponds to existential graded modal logic, its existential-positive fragment, and existential-positive modal logic, respectively. These results characterise the expressiveness of broad classes of GNNs independently of specific architectural choices, but we also show that each of these classes admits a GNN architecture of the same expressiveness. Technically, our approach uses a new well-quasi-order result for trees of bounded height, yielding finite representations of unravelling-invariant classes.
Przemysław Andrzej Wałęga, Bernardo Cuenca Grau
Jun 15, 2026stat.ML

Dynestyx: A Probabilistic Programming Library for Dynamical Systems

State-space models (SSMs) are the standard formalism for Bayesian treatment of dynamical systems, with natural applications in statistics, signal processing, and machine learning. Despite their importance in both theory and application, dynamical systems have proven difficult to incorporate in modern probabilistic programming languages (PPLs), making state-of-the-art methods less accessible to practitioners and introducing friction in following the "Bayesian workflow." We introduce dynestyx, a probabilistic programming library with first-class support for SSMs, including state-of-the-art methods in the estimation of both states and parameters. Through a single, unified interface, users may specify arbitrary priors for discrete-time or continuous-time dynamical systems, perform inference over mixed-effect data, and make state and parameter estimates with principled uncertainty quantification.
Daniel Waxman, Dmitry Batenkov, John Feser +4
Jun 7, 2026cs.PL

Compile Once, Differentiate Everywhere: A Differentiable Meta-Circular Interpreter

The boundary between program execution and gradient-based optimization has long limited the use of code itself as a learnable scientific model. We present a compiler that translates a self-hosting subset of Scheme into differentiable computation graphs for autograd backends. Because the subset can compile its own evaluator, this yields differentiable meta-circular interpretation (DMCI): a compiled Scheme interpreter executes programs supplied as data, while reverse-mode autodiff propagates gradients to continuous constants embedded in those programs. The interpreter is compiled once, so new programs inherit differentiability without recompilation or custom gradient machinery, while retaining closures, recursion, and data structures. We prove that gradients through the compiled interpreter are correct almost everywhere and show that they match direct compilation to numerical precision across 171 recursive and higher-order program-seed pairs. We then use DMCI for program-and-parameter co-search, where a large language model proposes Scheme programs and exact gradients calibrate their continuous parameters through a single frozen interpreter. This enables OpenEvolve-style program search in which an outer loop proposes discrete program structures and DMCI supplies exact gradient-based calibration of each candidate's continuous parameters. On battery capacity-fade data, the search recovers a knee-like degradation structure and improves held-out extrapolation over hand-crafted baselines on the harder early-extrapolation split, matching them on the later split. On a high-dimensional El Nino inverse problem, DMCI optimizes an interpreted Kalman-filter likelihood where gradient-free search fails. These results extend symbolic regression and neurosymbolic search from closed-form expressions to executable, stateful programs, making model-generated code directly optimizable against data.
Lucas Sheneman
Jun 7, 2026cs.AI

Standpoint Logics with Defeasible Beliefs

In this paper, we integrate the defeasible logic of Kraus, Lehmann and Magidor (KLM) with the standpoint logic framework of Gómez Álvarez and Rudolph. This is done with the goal of formally expressing knowledge taking into account multiple (possibly contradicting) viewpoints, which in turn may hold defeasible beliefs. In doing so, we utilise Defeasible Restricted Standpoint Logics (DRSL), introduced by Leisegang et al. Our work expands on previous work by providing a foundational representation result for DRSL semantics and systematically lifting several well-known entailment relations from the propositional case to the standpoint-enhanced setting. In particular, we characterise the semantics for DRSL through a set of KLM-style postulates adapted for the standpoints case. We furthermore provide a means to lift preferential entailment, and the class of entailment relations based on single ranking functions from the purely propositional to the standpoint-enhanced context, including rational and lexicographic closure. We show this can be done equivalently through semantic and algorithmic means. Furthermore, we show that, for each considered form of entailment, the complexity class of entailment checking does not change when moving from propositional KLM to DRSL.
Nicholas Leisegang, Thomas Meyer, Sebastian Rudolph
Jun 3, 2026cs.LO

Abduction Prover in Isabelle/HOL

Proof assistants based on expressive logics suffer limited automation for proof search, raising the cost of formal verification based on proof assistants. We address this problem by introducing the Abduction Prover for Isabelle/HOL. Given a challenging proof goal, the Abduction Prover constructs a proof script for the goal by identifying useful conjectures using abductive reasoning.
Yutaka Nagashima, Daniel Sebastian Goc
Jun 2, 2026cs.AI

Towards Non-Monotonic Entailment in Propositional Defeasible Standpoint Logic

Recent work in defeasible reasoning has seen notions of preferential semantics and entailment in the style of Kraus et al. applied to modal logics. However, work in this field has focussed primarily on satisfiability checking, and monotonic notions of entailment, which may be inferentially weak. One particular modal logic where this has been introduced is propositional standpoint logics, where modalities can express the views of different viewpoints. This has resulted in the formalisation of propositional defeasible standpoint logic (PDSL). In this paper, we propose a means of lifting the class of (non-monotonic) rational entailment relations from traditional KLM-style reasoning to a fragment of PDSL. In order to do so, we extend the expressivity of PDSL via situated standpoint conditionals, allowing us to talk about a defeasible conditional holding in the context of a given standpoint. This allows us to re-characterise the syntax of PDSL in terms of situated conditionals, and shows that a large fragment of PDSL is expressible as a set of situated conditionals. We then focus on characterising non-monotonic entailment in this fragment, defining a method to transport any ranking-based entailment relation from the propositional case into the PDSL case. This is first described in the general case and then considered in the specific cases of rational and lexicographic closures, providing a faithful translation of each inference into PDSL. We also show that entailment-checking in this fragment of PDSL can be done largely using algorithms from the propositional case, while preserving complexity bounds.
Nicholas Leisegang, Thomas Meyer, Ivan Varzniczak
Jun 1, 2026cs.CL

Fixing FOLIO and MALLS: Verified Annotations and an LLM-assisted Framework to Focus Human Relabeling

Accurate translation from Natural Language to First-Order Logic (NL-to-FOL) underpins neurosymbolic AI systems and Natural Language Inference (NLI), making the quality of NL-to-FOL benchmarks essential---yet these datasets have never been rigorously audited. Our first contribution is to present a systematic human inspection of the validation split of \textsf{FOLIO} and a subset of \textsf{MALLS} test instances, finding that approximately 42.5% and 42% of entries, respectively, contain incorrect FOL formalizations (i.e., ground truth labels), with additional rates of ambiguous NL sentences (17.8% and 51%) and incorrect NLI labels in \textsf{FOLIO} (8.4%). Our second contribution is to develop and release corrected ground truths for such datasets, showing that annotation errors distort model evaluation on a reference benchmark task: testing three state-of-the-art LLMs (Gemma~4 31B-it, Qwen3-30B-A3B, and GPT-4o-mini) with the corrected ground truths yields accuracy gains from +11 to +23 percentage points. Motivated by these findings, we propose an LLM-based framework to support humans in manual reviewing NL-to-FOL datasets. By directing reviewers toward the most error-prone instances, we empirically show that it is possible to achieve 90% dataset accuracy after reviewing fewer than 20% of instances, compared to over 76% required by unguided review. We release all human-verified annotations and the code for our framework.
Andrea Brunello, Cristian Curaba, Luca Geatti +3
May 30, 2026cs.AI

AXIOM: A Trust-First Neuro-Symbolic Execution Architecture for Verifiable Mathematical Reasoning

We present AXIOM, a trust-first neuro-symbolic execution architecture for natural-language mathematical reasoning. In AXIOM, the language model functions strictly as a canonicalizer: it rewrites informal problem text into a narrow schema consumed by a deterministic Computer-Algebra-System (CAS) pipeline, which derives and verifies the answer or abstains as a first-class output. Routing follows a 1:1:1 alignment between problem-shape regex, schema-specific prompt, and closed-form CAS handler, with 3,100+ such routes shipped and zero LOST_CORRECT regressions across 250+ consecutive ship commits. We report empirical results on 4 MATH categories with a cumulative correctness of 94.36% (2,592/2,747) at 100.00% trust on parseable (zero confident-wrong answers across the full 2,747-record benchmark), all four domains above the per-domain 70/90/70 floor with per-domain trust at 100.0%, and median latency of 1 ms on rule-only handlers (88% of records on the lm-eval arithmetic 20,000-record benchmark). The architecture has served ~30,000 production queries through a public deployment. The contribution we emphasize is not a final accuracy figure but the forward dynamic the architecture establishes: every logged abstain in production is a candidate correct after one ship cycle, since new tasks compose without regressing the registry. The operational discipline behind this property -- math-template bucketing, LOST_CORRECT scan as regression oracle, parseable-first onboarding, and abstain as first-class output -- constitutes a transferable framework for trustworthy neuro-symbolic systems beyond mathematics.
Alessio Bruno
May 28, 2026cs.AI

Transforming and Encoding FTS for SAT Solving: What Helps, What Hurts (Extended Version)

Factored tasks are a classical planning representation that extends SAS+ with limited forms of disjunctive preconditions, conditional effects, and angelic nondeterminism. This allows for a more compact representation of tasks than traditional formalisms such as STRIPS or SAS+, and supports a wide range of task transformations. However, existing planning approaches for factored tasks have been limited to heuristic search methods. In this work, we investigate how to encode factored tasks in SAT. We propose several ways to encode the tasks, focusing on different strategies for translating the factored transition relation into propositional logic. We also analyze how to exploit parallelism at various levels in this setting and study the impact of common task transformations on the performance of SAT-based planners.
João Filipe, Álvaro Torralba, Gregor Behnke
May 28, 2026cs.CL

Teaching Language Models to Check Grounded Claim Factuality with Human Test-Taking Strategies

Grounded claim factuality checking is important for large language model (LLM) applications such as retrieval-augmented generation, as it helps users assess the correctness of generated outputs. Existing metrics using entailment classifiers require dataset-specific threshold tuning, while LLM-based approaches often use direct prompting, which underutilises the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. We address this by formulating grounded claim factuality checking as a true/false reading comprehension task and prompting LLMs with explicit test-taking strategies for efficient reasoning. Our method reduces token usage by over 80% compared to unguided open-ended reasoning, and achieves competitive performance to more expensive alternatives across two factuality benchmarks, setting a new state of the art on one. To further reduce inference cost, we train small language models (SLMs) to replace LLMs in the checking pipeline. Using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and a self-revision mechanism, the SLMs learn to improve their factuality judgements. Experimental results show that the resulting SLMs perform on par with strong baselines, combining low inference costs with generating supporting rationales to support interpretability. Code and datasets will be released upon acceptance.
Yuxuan Ye, Raul Santos-Rodriguez, Edwin Simpson
May 26, 2026cs.LO

Many Logics, One Methodology: A Plea for Logical Pluralism in Formalised Reasoning (preprint)

This position statement looks back on two decades of work on shallow embeddings of non-classical logics in classical higher-order logic (HOL), a line of research that expanded into a range of logic embeddings in HOL and inspired the LogiKEy logic-pluralistic knowledge representation and reasoning methodology. This paper advances the case for logical pluralism at object-logic level within a unifying meta-logical framework such as LogiKEy, grounding the argument in computational metaphysics. More broadly, it advocates principled support for logical pluralism in modern proof assistants, and cautions against logical imperialism -- the rigid adoption of a single foundational logic for large-scale theory developments -- which impedes the interdisciplinary reuse that LogiKEy is designed to enable.
Christoph Benzmüller, Daniel Kirchner, Luca Pasetto
May 26, 2026cs.CL

Using Probabilistic Programs to Train Inductive Reasoning in Large Language Models

Post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) for reasoning typically focuses on deductive tasks such as mathematics and coding where correctness is verifiable. Yet, many real-world reasoning problems are inductive: agents must infer uncertain beliefs from sparse, ambiguous observations. There are challenges to using standard fine-tuning methods for inductive reasoning, including difficulties in curating large-scale, high-quality labeled datasets and in handling targets that are inherently distributional. In this work, we introduce a novel approach, called Program-based Posterior Training (PPT), to address these limitations: we use an LLM to generate diverse open-world scenarios as probabilistic programs, run probabilistic inference to produce distributional target responses to queries, and then fine-tune on these probabilistic soft labels. Using this approach, we fine-tune LLMs on 10,000 programmatically generated scenarios and evaluate on held-out motifs, human-labeled judgments, and external benchmarks. Overall, PPT substantially improves estimation accuracy on held-out inductive tasks, increases alignment with human judgments, and transfers to external benchmarks for estimation and calibration. Additionally, the gains in raw calibration are not subsumed by post-hoc temperature scaling, showing that the models have more deeply internalized uncertainty compared to output rescaling. Together, these results suggest that probabilistic-program-mediated fine-tuning is a promising approach for post-training LLMs to reliably perform approximate inductive inference.
Liyi Zhang, Akshay K. Jagadish, Brenden M. Lake +1
May 26, 2026cs.RO

Learning Compositional Symbolic Task Rules from Demonstrations with Inductive Logic Programming

Learning from Demonstration~(LfD) should capture not only how a task is executed, but also its high-level task structure that explains the demonstrated behavior. As robots become more autonomous, such task representations must be inspectable, reusable, and human-interpretable. To address this, we study how to represent and learn robotic tasks with inductive logic programming~(ILP) by decomposing a complex task into a series of simpler learning objectives at different abstraction (ontological) levels. The system infers symbolic rules from demonstrations and prior (domain) knowledge, and reuses learned rules when learning higher-level task structure. We evaluate the approach in a synthetic block-assembly scenario and show that the learned abstractions are interpretable and support strong generalization to harder, held-out tasks with unseen objects. These results provide preliminary evidence that decomposed ILP is a feasible approach to task-level LfD.
Oleh Borys, Karla Stepanova
May 25, 2026cs.AI

A Deep Dive into Axiomatic Design -- Part I: Problem Formulation

Problem formulation translating customer needs and constraints into a minimum set of independent first-level functional requirements, is arguably the most critical step in every design framework, including axiomatic design yet it is frequently misunderstood or underestimated in practice. This paper focuses exclusively on problem formulation in axiomatic design it clarifies what first-level FRs are (and are not), explains why they should not legitimately vary across designers given the same needs and constraints, and highlights intrinsic difficulties and recurring pitfalls that lead to design failure. The discussion is grounded primarily in Nam P.Suh's three books. The Principles of Design, Axiomatic Design Advances and Applications, and Complexity Theory, and it offers practical guidance to help designers formulate well-posed first-level FRs. Finally, the paper briefly revisits problem formulation in the era of large language models and discusses what such tools can (and cannot) contribute at the first level.
Aydin Homay
May 22, 2026cs.LO

Arrow-Type Impossibility for Genuinely Modal Judgments

Judgment aggregation studies how to combine individual judgments on logically related propositions into a collective judgment. Classical impossibility results show that sufficiently strong logical interconnections force dictatorship under natural aggregation axioms. In this paper, we ask whether such impossibility can still arise when the objects of aggregation are required to be genuinely modal judgments rather than plain factual propositions. Since modal logic contains propositional logic, this question is meaningful only if one excludes fact-based aggregation in disguise. We show that Arrow-type impossibility already re-emerges in a strikingly sparse modal setting. We prove an impossibility theorem on a simple cyclic frame for an agenda generated from a single propositional variable by repeated applications of a single modal operator, and we further demonstrate this phenomenon for an alternative family of frames satisfying a natural symmetry condition. Thus, even under a modal-operator requirement, semantic structure alone can generate the logical interconnections needed for dictatorship. Technically, our analysis has two layers. First, we prove a semantic reduction theorem showing that certain iterated modal patterns can be collapsed by shifting the evaluation point. Second, building on this reduction, we identify a local-to-global frame mechanism by which frame geometry yields minimally inconsistent modal judgment sets and the strong path-connectivity required for impossibility. The same reduction also turns consistency checking into a small combinatorial covering problem, which yields efficient implementations of non-dictatorial aggregation procedures.
Yutaka Nagai, Hirotaka Ono
May 22, 2026cs.AI

Breaking the Chains of Probability: Neutrosophic Logic as a New Framework for Epistemic Uncertainty in Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) are predominantly governed by probabilistic frameworks in which the sum of outcome probabilities is constrained to unity. This architectural limitation, often imposed by Softmax layers, leads to a collapse of uncertainty that makes it difficult to differentiate between epistemic uncertainty, paradox, and vagueness. We present an empirical investigation of the application of Neutrosophic Logic, a framework that treats Truth (T), Indeterminacy (I), and Falsity (F) as three independent dimensions, to model epistemic states in LLMs. We conducted experiments on a family of four OpenAI GPT models across five linguistic phenomena: logical paradoxes, epistemic ignorance, vagueness, ethical contradictions, and future contingencies, under three prompting strategies: neutrosophic, probabilistic, and entropy-derived. Our findings reveal that the neutrosophic approach, by allowing T+I+F > 1, a state we term hyper-truth, provides a richer representation of a model's internal state. In 35% of evaluations, hyper-truth emerged spontaneously, predominantly under ethical contradiction and logical paradox. We demonstrate that this approach preserves truth values in fuzzy contexts and offers a robust method for identifying and quantifying internal model conflict. We conclude that the integration of neutrosophic evaluation layers is a critical step toward more transparent, reliable, and ethically aware AI systems.
Maikel Yelandi Leyva-Vázquez, Florentin Smarandache
May 20, 2026cs.LO

On the Complexity of Entailment for Cumulative Propositional Dependence Logics

This paper establishes and proves complexity results for entailment for cumulative propositional dependence logic and for cumulative propositional logic with team semantics. As recently shown, cumulative logics are famously characterised by System~C and exactly captured by the cumulative models of Kraus, Lehmann and Magidor. This gives rise to the entailment problem via relational models, which is specifically considered here.
Kai Sauerwald, Juha Kontinen, Arne Meier
May 18, 2026cs.CL

FOL2NS: Generating Natural Sentences from First-Order Logic

Translating formal language into natural language is a foundational challenge in NLP, driving various downstream applications in semantic parsing, theorem validation, and question answering. In this study, we introduce First-Order Logic to Natural Sentence (FOL2NS), a neurosymbolic framework designed to generate synthetic FOL formulas and convert them into natural human expressions. It handles deeply nested structures with varying quantifier depths (QD), which are rarely captured by existing corpora. By combining rule-driven modules with fine-tuned language models, FOL2NS enhances the diversity and coverage of the generated samples. In our experiments, we systematically evaluate the framework's capabilities through both character-level analysis and overall performance metrics. Experimental results show that FOL2NS can reliably produce well-formed templates and fluent statements, but it faces challenges in achieving precise semantic representations and natural generation as structural complexity increases.
Mei Jia
May 18, 2026cs.CL

A Pilot Benchmark for NL-to-FOL Translation in Planetary Exploration

Future planetary exploration envisions autonomous robotic agents operating under severe communication constraints, without global positioning, and with minimal human intervention. In such environments, agents must not only perceive and act, but also reason over mission objectives, operational constraints, and evolving environmental conditions. While prior work has largely focused on perception and control, the translation of high-level mission knowledge into structured, machine-interpretable representations remains underexplored. We introduce a pilot benchmark for translating natural language (NL) into First-Order Logic (FOL) within the domain of planetary exploration. The dataset is constructed from real mission documentation sourced from NASA's Planetary Data System (PDS), spanning missions from 2003 to 2013. These documents describe mission phases such as launch, boost, coast, cruise, and orbital operations in rich natural language. We manually annotate these documents with corresponding FOL representations that capture temporal structure, agent roles, and operational dependencies. In addition, we provide structured predicate vocabularies and typed constants to enable controlled experimentation with varying levels of prior knowledge. This pilot benchmark provides a foundation for research at the intersection of language understanding and formal reasoning, grounded in real-world, safety-critical mission data. The dataset is provided at: https://github.com/HaydenMM/planetary-logic-benchmark/blob/main/pilot_benchmark.json
Hayden Moore, Suman Saha, Mahfuza Farooque