LogicSkills: A Structured Benchmark for Formal Reasoning in Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Rabern, Brian, Mondorf, Philipp, Plank, Barbara
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Rabern, Brian
Mondorf, Philipp
Plank, Barbara
author_facet Rabern, Brian
Mondorf, Philipp
Plank, Barbara
contents Large language models perform well on many logical reasoning benchmarks, but it remains unclear which core logical skills they truly master. To address this, we introduce LogicSkills, a benchmark that isolates three fundamental logical skills: (i) $\textit{formal symbolization}\unicode{x2014}{}$translating premises into first-order logic; (ii) $\textit{countermodel construction}\unicode{x2014}$showing that an argument is logically invalid by constructing a finite countermodel; and (iii) $\textit{validity assessment}\unicode{x2014}$determining whether a conclusion follows from a set of premises. Items are drawn from the two-variable fragment of first-order logic without identity and are presented in both English and a Carrollian nonce-word language. All instances are solver-verified with Z3 for correctness and non-triviality. Across conventional instruction-tuned LLMs, performance is high on $\textit{validity assessment}$ but substantially lower on $\textit{formal symbolization}$ and $\textit{countermodel construction}$, highlighting that high task-level accuracy can mask weaknesses in core logical skills. In contrast, recent reasoning-tuned models perform strongly across all three tasks, suggesting a more systematic logical skill profile.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_06533
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle LogicSkills: A Structured Benchmark for Formal Reasoning in Large Language Models
Rabern, Brian
Mondorf, Philipp
Plank, Barbara
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Large language models perform well on many logical reasoning benchmarks, but it remains unclear which core logical skills they truly master. To address this, we introduce LogicSkills, a benchmark that isolates three fundamental logical skills: (i) $\textit{formal symbolization}\unicode{x2014}{}$translating premises into first-order logic; (ii) $\textit{countermodel construction}\unicode{x2014}$showing that an argument is logically invalid by constructing a finite countermodel; and (iii) $\textit{validity assessment}\unicode{x2014}$determining whether a conclusion follows from a set of premises. Items are drawn from the two-variable fragment of first-order logic without identity and are presented in both English and a Carrollian nonce-word language. All instances are solver-verified with Z3 for correctness and non-triviality. Across conventional instruction-tuned LLMs, performance is high on $\textit{validity assessment}$ but substantially lower on $\textit{formal symbolization}$ and $\textit{countermodel construction}$, highlighting that high task-level accuracy can mask weaknesses in core logical skills. In contrast, recent reasoning-tuned models perform strongly across all three tasks, suggesting a more systematic logical skill profile.
title LogicSkills: A Structured Benchmark for Formal Reasoning in Large Language Models
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06533