Improving Chain-of-Thought for Logical Reasoning via Attention-Aware Intervention

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Phuong, Nguyen Minh, Tien, Dang Huu, Inoue, Naoya
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Phuong, Nguyen Minh
Tien, Dang Huu
Inoue, Naoya
author_facet Phuong, Nguyen Minh
Tien, Dang Huu
Inoue, Naoya
contents Modern logical reasoning with LLMs primarily relies on employing complex interactive frameworks that decompose the reasoning process into subtasks solved through carefully designed prompts or requiring external resources (e.g., symbolic solvers) to exploit their strong logical structures. While interactive approaches introduce additional overhead or depend on external components, which limit their scalability. In this work, we introduce a non-interactive, end-to-end framework for reasoning tasks, enabling reasoning to emerge within the model itself-improving generalization while preserving analyzability without any external resources. We show that introducing structural information into the few-shot prompt activates a subset of attention heads that patterns aligned with logical reasoning operators. Building on this insight, we propose Attention-Aware Intervention (AAI), an inference-time intervention method that reweights attention scores across selected heads identified by their logical patterns. AAI offers an efficient way to steer the model's reasoning toward leveraging prior knowledge through attention modulation. Extensive experiments show that AAI enhances logical reasoning performance across diverse benchmarks, and model architectures, while incurring negligible additional computational overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/phuongnm94/aai_for_logical_reasoning.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_09805
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving Chain-of-Thought for Logical Reasoning via Attention-Aware Intervention
Phuong, Nguyen Minh
Tien, Dang Huu
Inoue, Naoya
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Modern logical reasoning with LLMs primarily relies on employing complex interactive frameworks that decompose the reasoning process into subtasks solved through carefully designed prompts or requiring external resources (e.g., symbolic solvers) to exploit their strong logical structures. While interactive approaches introduce additional overhead or depend on external components, which limit their scalability. In this work, we introduce a non-interactive, end-to-end framework for reasoning tasks, enabling reasoning to emerge within the model itself-improving generalization while preserving analyzability without any external resources. We show that introducing structural information into the few-shot prompt activates a subset of attention heads that patterns aligned with logical reasoning operators. Building on this insight, we propose Attention-Aware Intervention (AAI), an inference-time intervention method that reweights attention scores across selected heads identified by their logical patterns. AAI offers an efficient way to steer the model's reasoning toward leveraging prior knowledge through attention modulation. Extensive experiments show that AAI enhances logical reasoning performance across diverse benchmarks, and model architectures, while incurring negligible additional computational overhead. Code is available at https://github.com/phuongnm94/aai_for_logical_reasoning.
title Improving Chain-of-Thought for Logical Reasoning via Attention-Aware Intervention
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.09805