Robustness of Neurosymbolic Reasoners on First-Order Logic Problems

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Bansal, Hannah, Kurniawan, Kemal, Frermann, Lea
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Bansal, Hannah
Kurniawan, Kemal
Frermann, Lea
author_facet Bansal, Hannah
Kurniawan, Kemal
Frermann, Lea
contents Recent trends in NLP aim to improve reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs), with key focus on generalization and robustness to variations in tasks. Counterfactual task variants introduce minimal but semantically meaningful changes to otherwise valid first-order logic (FOL) problem instances altering a single predicate or swapping roles of constants to probe whether a reasoning system can maintain logical consistency under perturbation. Previous studies showed that LLMs becomes brittle on counterfactual variations, suggesting that they often rely on spurious surface patterns to generate responses. In this work, we explore if a neurosymbolic (NS) approach that integrates an LLM and a symbolic logical solver could mitigate this problem. Experiments across LLMs of varying sizes show that NS methods are more robust but perform worse overall that purely neural methods. We then propose NSCoT that combines an NS method and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and demonstrate that while it improves performance, NSCoT still lags behind standard CoT. Our analysis opens research directions for future work.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_17377
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Robustness of Neurosymbolic Reasoners on First-Order Logic Problems
Bansal, Hannah
Kurniawan, Kemal
Frermann, Lea
Computation and Language
Recent trends in NLP aim to improve reasoning capabilities in Large Language Models (LLMs), with key focus on generalization and robustness to variations in tasks. Counterfactual task variants introduce minimal but semantically meaningful changes to otherwise valid first-order logic (FOL) problem instances altering a single predicate or swapping roles of constants to probe whether a reasoning system can maintain logical consistency under perturbation. Previous studies showed that LLMs becomes brittle on counterfactual variations, suggesting that they often rely on spurious surface patterns to generate responses. In this work, we explore if a neurosymbolic (NS) approach that integrates an LLM and a symbolic logical solver could mitigate this problem. Experiments across LLMs of varying sizes show that NS methods are more robust but perform worse overall that purely neural methods. We then propose NSCoT that combines an NS method and Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting and demonstrate that while it improves performance, NSCoT still lags behind standard CoT. Our analysis opens research directions for future work.
title Robustness of Neurosymbolic Reasoners on First-Order Logic Problems
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.17377