Daily Papers

In this paper, we introduce BMMR, a large-scale bilingual, multimodal, multi-disciplinary reasoning dataset for the community to develop and evaluate large multimodal models (LMMs). BMMR comprises 110k college-level questions spanning 300 UNESCO-defined subjects, spanning diverse formats-multiple-choice, fill-in-the-blank, and open-ended QA-and sourced from both print and digital media such as books, exams, and quizzes. All data are curated and filtered via a human-in-the-loop and scalable framework, and each instance is paired with a high-quality reasoning path. The dataset is organized into two parts: BMMR-Eval that comprises 20,458 high-quality instances to comprehensively assess LMMs' knowledge and reasoning across multiple disciplines in both Chinese and English; and BMMR-Train that contains 88,991 instances to support further research and development, extending the current focus on mathematical reasoning to diverse disciplines and domains. In addition, we propose the process-based multi-discipline verifier (i.e., BMMR-Verifier) for accurate and fine-grained evaluation of reasoning paths. Extensive experiments on 24 models reveal that (i) even SOTA models (e.g., o3 and Gemini-2.5-Pro) leave substantial headroom on BMMR-Eval; (ii) reasoning models exhibit discipline bias and outperform LMMs only on specific subjects; (iii) open-source models still trail their proprietary counterparts; and (iv) fine-tuning on BMMR-Train narrows this gap. Additionally, we conduct reasoning-chain analyses using BMMR-Verifier and other in-depth studies, uncovering the challenges LMMs currently face in multidisciplinary reasoning. We will release the data, and we hope our work can offer insights and contributions to the community.

We introduce InternVL 2.5, an advanced multimodal large language model (MLLM) series that builds upon InternVL 2.0, maintaining its core model architecture while introducing significant enhancements in training and testing strategies as well as data quality. In this work, we delve into the relationship between model scaling and performance, systematically exploring the performance trends in vision encoders, language models, dataset sizes, and test-time configurations. Through extensive evaluations on a wide range of benchmarks, including multi-discipline reasoning, document understanding, multi-image / video understanding, real-world comprehension, multimodal hallucination detection, visual grounding, multilingual capabilities, and pure language processing, InternVL 2.5 exhibits competitive performance, rivaling leading commercial models such as GPT-4o and Claude-3.5-Sonnet. Notably, our model is the first open-source MLLMs to surpass 70% on the MMMU benchmark, achieving a 3.7-point improvement through Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning and showcasing strong potential for test-time scaling. We hope this model contributes to the open-source community by setting new standards for developing and applying multimodal AI systems. HuggingFace demo see https://huggingface.co/spaces/OpenGVLab/InternVL

The evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has been significantly accelerated by advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Large Multimodal Models (LMMs), gradually showcasing potential cognitive reasoning abilities in problem-solving and scientific discovery (i.e., AI4Science) once exclusive to human intellect. To comprehensively evaluate current models' performance in cognitive reasoning abilities, we introduce OlympicArena, which includes 11,163 bilingual problems across both text-only and interleaved text-image modalities. These challenges encompass a wide range of disciplines spanning seven fields and 62 international Olympic competitions, rigorously examined for data leakage. We argue that the challenges in Olympic competition problems are ideal for evaluating AI's cognitive reasoning due to their complexity and interdisciplinary nature, which are essential for tackling complex scientific challenges and facilitating discoveries. Beyond evaluating performance across various disciplines using answer-only criteria, we conduct detailed experiments and analyses from multiple perspectives. We delve into the models' cognitive reasoning abilities, their performance across different modalities, and their outcomes in process-level evaluations, which are vital for tasks requiring complex reasoning with lengthy solutions. Our extensive evaluations reveal that even advanced models like GPT-4o only achieve a 39.97% overall accuracy, illustrating current AI limitations in complex reasoning and multimodal integration. Through the OlympicArena, we aim to advance AI towards superintelligence, equipping it to address more complex challenges in science and beyond. We also provide a comprehensive set of resources to support AI research, including a benchmark dataset, an open-source annotation platform, a detailed evaluation tool, and a leaderboard with automatic submission features.

Multimodal reasoning, which integrates language and visual cues into problem solving and decision making, is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence and a crucial step toward artificial general intelligence. However, the evaluation of multimodal reasoning capabilities in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) remains inadequate. Most existing reasoning benchmarks are constrained by limited data size, narrow domain coverage, and unstructured knowledge distribution. To close these gaps, we introduce MDK12-Bench, a multi-disciplinary benchmark assessing the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs via real-world K-12 examinations. Spanning six disciplines (math, physics, chemistry, biology, geography, and information science), our benchmark comprises 140K reasoning instances across diverse difficulty levels from primary school to 12th grade. It features 6,827 instance-level knowledge point annotations based on a well-organized knowledge structure, detailed answer explanations, difficulty labels and cross-year partitions, providing a robust platform for comprehensive evaluation. Additionally, we present a novel dynamic evaluation framework to mitigate data contamination issues by bootstrapping question forms, question types, and image styles during evaluation. Extensive experiment on MDK12-Bench reveals the significant limitation of current MLLMs in multimodal reasoning. The findings on our benchmark provide insights into the development of the next-generation models. Our data and codes are available at https://github.com/LanceZPF/MDK12.

We introduce MMMU: a new benchmark designed to evaluate multimodal models on massive multi-discipline tasks demanding college-level subject knowledge and deliberate reasoning. MMMU includes 11.5K meticulously collected multimodal questions from college exams, quizzes, and textbooks, covering six core disciplines: Art & Design, Business, Science, Health & Medicine, Humanities & Social Science, and Tech & Engineering. These questions span 30 subjects and 183 subfields, comprising 30 highly heterogeneous image types, such as charts, diagrams, maps, tables, music sheets, and chemical structures. Unlike existing benchmarks, MMMU focuses on advanced perception and reasoning with domain-specific knowledge, challenging models to perform tasks akin to those faced by experts. Our evaluation of 14 open-source LMMs and the proprietary GPT-4V(ision) highlights the substantial challenges posed by MMMU. Even the advanced GPT-4V only achieves a 56% accuracy, indicating significant room for improvement. We believe MMMU will stimulate the community to build next-generation multimodal foundation models towards expert artificial general intelligence.

As the capabilities of large multimodal models (LMMs) continue to advance, evaluating the performance of LMMs emerges as an increasing need. Additionally, there is an even larger gap in evaluating the advanced knowledge and reasoning abilities of LMMs in non-English contexts such as Chinese. We introduce CMMMU, a new Chinese Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding benchmark designed to evaluate LMMs on tasks demanding college-level subject knowledge and deliberate reasoning in a Chinese context. CMMMU is inspired by and strictly follows the annotation and analysis pattern of MMMU. CMMMU includes 12k manually collected multimodal questions from college exams, quizzes, and textbooks, covering six core disciplines: Art & Design, Business, Science, Health & Medicine, Humanities & Social Science, and Tech & Engineering, like its companion, MMMU. These questions span 30 subjects and comprise 39 highly heterogeneous image types, such as charts, diagrams, maps, tables, music sheets, and chemical structures. CMMMU focuses on complex perception and reasoning with domain-specific knowledge in the Chinese context. We evaluate 11 open-source LLMs and one proprietary GPT-4V(ision). Even GPT-4V only achieves accuracies of 42%, indicating a large space for improvement. CMMMU will boost the community to build the next-generation LMMs towards expert artificial intelligence and promote the democratization of LMMs by providing diverse language contexts.

Unified multimodal models aim to jointly enable visual understanding and generation, yet current benchmarks rarely examine their true integration. Existing evaluations either treat the two abilities in isolation or overlook tasks that inherently couple them. To address this gap, we present Uni-MMMU, a comprehensive and discipline-aware benchmark that systematically unfolds the bidirectional synergy between generation and understanding across eight reasoning-centric domains, including science, coding, mathematics, and puzzles. Each task is bidirectionally coupled, demanding models to (i) leverage conceptual understanding to guide precise visual synthesis, or (ii) utilize generation as a cognitive scaffold for analytical reasoning. Uni-MMMU incorporates verifiable intermediate reasoning steps, unique ground truths, and a reproducible scoring protocol for both textual and visual outputs. Through extensive evaluation of state-of-the-art unified, generation-only, and understanding-only models, we reveal substantial performance disparities and cross-modal dependencies, offering new insights into when and how these abilities reinforce one another, and establishing a reliable foundation for advancing unified models.

We introduce EXAMS-V, a new challenging multi-discipline multimodal multilingual exam benchmark for evaluating vision language models. It consists of 20,932 multiple-choice questions across 20 school disciplines covering natural science, social science, and other miscellaneous studies, e.g., religion, fine arts, business, etc. EXAMS-V includes a variety of multimodal features such as text, images, tables, figures, diagrams, maps, scientific symbols, and equations. The questions come in 11 languages from 7 language families. Unlike existing benchmarks, EXAMS-V is uniquely curated by gathering school exam questions from various countries, with a variety of education systems. This distinctive approach calls for intricate reasoning across diverse languages and relies on region-specific knowledge. Solving the problems in the dataset requires advanced perception and joint reasoning over the text and the visual content of the image. Our evaluation results demonstrate that this is a challenging dataset, which is difficult even for advanced vision-text models such as GPT-4V and Gemini; this underscores the inherent complexity of the dataset and its significance as a future benchmark.

We introduce MMVU, a comprehensive expert-level, multi-discipline benchmark for evaluating foundation models in video understanding. MMVU includes 3,000 expert-annotated questions spanning 27 subjects across four core disciplines: Science, Healthcare, Humanities & Social Sciences, and Engineering. Compared to prior benchmarks, MMVU features three key advancements. First, it challenges models to apply domain-specific knowledge and perform expert-level reasoning to analyze specialized-domain videos, moving beyond the basic visual perception typically assessed in current video benchmarks. Second, each example is annotated by human experts from scratch. We implement strict data quality controls to ensure the high quality of the dataset. Finally, each example is enriched with expert-annotated reasoning rationals and relevant domain knowledge, facilitating in-depth analysis. We conduct an extensive evaluation of 32 frontier multimodal foundation models on MMVU. The latest System-2-capable models, o1 and Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking, achieve the highest performance among the tested models. However, they still fall short of matching human expertise. Through in-depth error analyses and case studies, we offer actionable insights for future advancements in expert-level, knowledge-intensive video understanding for specialized domains.

This paper introduces MMMU-Pro, a robust version of the Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning (MMMU) benchmark. MMMU-Pro rigorously assesses multimodal models' true understanding and reasoning capabilities through a three-step process based on MMMU: (1) filtering out questions answerable by text-only models, (2) augmenting candidate options, and (3) introducing a vision-only input setting where questions are embedded within images. This setting challenges AI to truly "see" and "read" simultaneously, testing a fundamental human cognitive skill of seamlessly integrating visual and textual information. Results show that model performance is substantially lower on MMMU-Pro than on MMMU, ranging from 16.8% to 26.9% across models. We explore the impact of OCR prompts and Chain of Thought (CoT) reasoning, finding that OCR prompts have minimal effect while CoT generally improves performance. MMMU-Pro provides a more rigorous evaluation tool, closely mimicking real-world scenarios and offering valuable directions for future research in multimodal AI.

Multimodal Language Language Models (MLLMs) demonstrate the emerging abilities of "world models" -- interpreting and reasoning about complex real-world dynamics. To assess these abilities, we posit videos are the ideal medium, as they encapsulate rich representations of real-world dynamics and causalities. To this end, we introduce MMWorld, a new benchmark for multi-discipline, multi-faceted multimodal video understanding. MMWorld distinguishes itself from previous video understanding benchmarks with two unique advantages: (1) multi-discipline, covering various disciplines that often require domain expertise for comprehensive understanding; (2) multi-faceted reasoning, including explanation, counterfactual thinking, future prediction, etc. MMWorld consists of a human-annotated dataset to evaluate MLLMs with questions about the whole videos and a synthetic dataset to analyze MLLMs within a single modality of perception. Together, MMWorld encompasses 1,910 videos across seven broad disciplines and 69 subdisciplines, complete with 6,627 question-answer pairs and associated captions. The evaluation includes 2 proprietary and 10 open-source MLLMs, which struggle on MMWorld (e.g., GPT-4V performs the best with only 52.3\% accuracy), showing large room for improvement. Further ablation studies reveal other interesting findings such as models' different skill sets from humans. We hope MMWorld can serve as an essential step towards world model evaluation in videos.

New NLP benchmarks are urgently needed to align with the rapid development of large language models (LLMs). We present C-Eval, the first comprehensive Chinese evaluation suite designed to assess advanced knowledge and reasoning abilities of foundation models in a Chinese context. C-Eval comprises multiple-choice questions across four difficulty levels: middle school, high school, college, and professional. The questions span 52 diverse disciplines, ranging from humanities to science and engineering. C-Eval is accompanied by C-Eval Hard, a subset of very challenging subjects in C-Eval that requires advanced reasoning abilities to solve. We conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the most advanced LLMs on C-Eval, including both English- and Chinese-oriented models. Results indicate that only GPT-4 could achieve an average accuracy of over 60%, suggesting that there is still significant room for improvement for current LLMs. We anticipate C-Eval will help analyze important strengths and shortcomings of foundation models, and foster their development and growth for Chinese users.

As multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) frequently exhibit errors when solving scientific problems, evaluating the validity of their reasoning processes is critical for ensuring reliability and uncovering fine-grained model weaknesses. Since human evaluation is laborious and costly, prompting MLLMs as automated process judges has become a common practice. However, the reliability of these model-based judges remains uncertain. To address this, we introduce ProJudgeBench, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for evaluating abilities of MLLM-based process judges. ProJudgeBench comprises 2,400 test cases and 50,118 step-level labels, spanning four scientific disciplines with diverse difficulty levels and multi-modal content. In ProJudgeBench, each step is meticulously annotated by human experts for correctness, error type, and explanation, enabling a systematic evaluation of judges' capabilities to detect, classify and diagnose errors. Evaluation on ProJudgeBench reveals a significant performance gap between open-source and proprietary models. To bridge this gap, we further propose ProJudge-173k, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset, and a Dynamic Dual-Phase fine-tuning strategy that encourages models to explicitly reason through problem-solving before assessing solutions. Both contributions significantly enhance the process evaluation capabilities of open-source models. All the resources will be released to foster future research of reliable multi-modal process evaluation.

Recent advancements in language multimodal models (LMMs) for video have demonstrated their potential for understanding video content, yet the task of comprehending multi-discipline lectures remains largely unexplored. We introduce Video-MMLU, a massive benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of LMMs in understanding Multi-Discipline Lectures. We evaluate over 90 open-source and proprietary models, ranging from 0.5B to 40B parameters. Our results highlight the limitations of current models in addressing the cognitive challenges presented by these lectures, especially in tasks requiring both perception and reasoning. Additionally, we explore how the number of visual tokens and the large language models influence performance, offering insights into the interplay between multimodal perception and reasoning in lecture comprehension.

In this paper, we introduce knowledge image generation as a new task, alongside the Massive Multi-Discipline Multi-Tier Knowledge-Image Generation Benchmark (MMMG) to probe the reasoning capability of image generation models. Knowledge images have been central to human civilization and to the mechanisms of human learning -- a fact underscored by dual-coding theory and the picture-superiority effect. Generating such images is challenging, demanding multimodal reasoning that fuses world knowledge with pixel-level grounding into clear explanatory visuals. To enable comprehensive evaluation, MMMG offers 4,456 expert-validated (knowledge) image-prompt pairs spanning 10 disciplines, 6 educational levels, and diverse knowledge formats such as charts, diagrams, and mind maps. To eliminate confounding complexity during evaluation, we adopt a unified Knowledge Graph (KG) representation. Each KG explicitly delineates a target image's core entities and their dependencies. We further introduce MMMG-Score to evaluate generated knowledge images. This metric combines factual fidelity, measured by graph-edit distance between KGs, with visual clarity assessment. Comprehensive evaluations of 16 state-of-the-art text-to-image generation models expose serious reasoning deficits -- low entity fidelity, weak relations, and clutter -- with GPT-4o achieving an MMMG-Score of only 50.20, underscoring the benchmark's difficulty. To spur further progress, we release FLUX-Reason (MMMG-Score of 34.45), an effective and open baseline that combines a reasoning LLM with diffusion models and is trained on 16,000 curated knowledge image-prompt pairs.

Multilingual multimodal reasoning is a core component in achieving human-level intelligence. However, most existing benchmarks for multilingual multimodal reasoning struggle to differentiate between models of varying performance; even language models without visual capabilities can easily achieve high scores. This leaves a comprehensive evaluation of leading multilingual multimodal models largely unexplored. In this work, we introduce M4U, a novel and challenging benchmark for assessing the capability of multi-discipline multilingual multimodal understanding and reasoning. M4U contains 8,931 samples covering 64 disciplines across 16 subfields in Science, Engineering, and Healthcare in Chinese, English, and German. Using M4U, we conduct extensive evaluations of 21 leading Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) and Large Language Models (LLMs) with external tools. The evaluation results show that the state-of-the-art model, GPT-4o, achieves only 47.6% average accuracy on M4U. Additionally, we observe that the leading LMMs exhibit significant language preferences. Our in-depth analysis indicates that leading LMMs, including GPT-4o, suffer performance degradation when prompted with cross-lingual multimodal questions, such as images with key textual information in Chinese while the question is in German. We believe that M4U can serve as a crucial tool for systematically evaluating LMMs based on their multilingual multimodal reasoning capabilities and monitoring their development. The homepage, codes and data are public available.

Developing generalizable reasoning capabilities in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) remains challenging. Motivated by cognitive science literature suggesting that gameplay promotes transferable cognitive skills, we propose a novel post-training paradigm, Visual Game Learning, or ViGaL, where MLLMs develop out-of-domain generalization of multimodal reasoning through playing arcade-like games. Specifically, we show that post-training a 7B-parameter MLLM via reinforcement learning (RL) on simple arcade-like games, e.g. Snake, significantly enhances its downstream performance on multimodal math benchmarks like MathVista, and on multi-discipline questions like MMMU, without seeing any worked solutions, equations, or diagrams during RL, suggesting the capture of transferable reasoning skills. Remarkably, our model outperforms specialist models tuned on multimodal reasoning data in multimodal reasoning benchmarks, while preserving the base model's performance on general visual benchmarks, a challenge where specialist models often fall short. Our findings suggest a new post-training paradigm: synthetic, rule-based games can serve as controllable and scalable pre-text tasks that unlock generalizable multimodal reasoning abilities in MLLMs.

Multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) have demonstrated promising capabilities across various tasks by integrating textual and visual information to achieve visual understanding in complex scenarios. Despite the availability of several benchmarks aims to evaluating MLLMs in tasks from visual question answering to complex problem-solving, most focus predominantly on mathematics or general visual understanding tasks. This reveals a critical gap in current benchmarks, which often overlook the inclusion of other key scientific disciplines such as physics and chemistry. To address this gap, we meticulously construct a comprehensive benchmark, named VisScience, which is utilized to assess the multi-modal scientific reasoning across the three disciplines of mathematics, physics, and chemistry. This benchmark comprises 3,000 questions drawn from K12 education - spanning elementary school through high school - equally distributed across three disciplines, with 1,000 questions per discipline. The questions within VisScience span 21 distinct subjects and are categorized into five difficulty levels, offering a broad spectrum of topics within each discipline. With VisScience, we present a detailed evaluation of the performance of 25 representative MLLMs in scientific reasoning. Experimental results demonstrate that closed-source MLLMs generally outperform open-source models. The best performance observed include a 53.4\% accuracy in mathematics by Claude3.5-Sonnet, 38.2\% in physics by GPT-4o, and 47.0\% in chemistry by Gemini-1.5-Pro. These results underscore the strengths and limitations of MLLMs, suggesting areas for future improvement and highlighting the importance of developing models that can effectively handle the diverse demands of multi-modal scientific reasoning.

Scientific reasoning, the process through which humans apply logic, evidence, and critical thinking to explore and interpret scientific phenomena, is essential in advancing knowledge reasoning across diverse fields. However, despite significant progress, current scientific reasoning models still struggle with generalization across domains and often fall short of multimodal perception. Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), which integrate text, images, and other modalities, present an exciting opportunity to overcome these limitations and enhance scientific reasoning. Therefore, this position paper argues that MLLMs can significantly advance scientific reasoning across disciplines such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology. First, we propose a four-stage research roadmap of scientific reasoning capabilities, and highlight the current state of MLLM applications in scientific reasoning, noting their ability to integrate and reason over diverse data types. Second, we summarize the key challenges that remain obstacles to achieving MLLM's full potential. To address these challenges, we propose actionable insights and suggestions for the future. Overall, our work offers a novel perspective on MLLM integration with scientific reasoning, providing the LLM community with a valuable vision for achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

Reasoning stands as a cornerstone of intelligence, enabling the synthesis of existing knowledge to solve complex problems. Despite remarkable progress, existing reasoning benchmarks often fail to rigorously evaluate the nuanced reasoning capabilities required for complex, real-world problemsolving, particularly in multi-disciplinary and multimodal contexts. In this paper, we introduce a graduate-level, multi-disciplinary, EnglishChinese benchmark, dubbed as Reasoning Bench (R-Bench), for assessing the reasoning capability of both language and multimodal models. RBench spans 1,094 questions across 108 subjects for language model evaluation and 665 questions across 83 subjects for multimodal model testing in both English and Chinese. These questions are meticulously curated to ensure rigorous difficulty calibration, subject balance, and crosslinguistic alignment, enabling the assessment to be an Olympiad-level multi-disciplinary benchmark. We evaluate widely used models, including OpenAI o1, GPT-4o, DeepSeek-R1, etc. Experimental results indicate that advanced models perform poorly on complex reasoning, especially multimodal reasoning. Even the top-performing model OpenAI o1 achieves only 53.2% accuracy on our multimodal evaluation. Data and code are made publicly available at here.

The integration of large language models (LLMs) into medical practice holds transformative potential, yet their real-world clinical utility remains limited by critical alignment challenges: (1) a disconnect between static evaluation benchmarks and dynamic clinical cognitive needs, (2) difficulties in adapting to evolving, multi-source medical standards, and (3) the inability of conventional reward models to capture nuanced, multi-dimensional medical quality criteria. To address these gaps, we propose MR-RML (Multidimensional Rubric-oriented Reward Model Learning) via GPRC (Geometric Projection Reference Constraints), a novel alignment framework that integrates medical standards into a structured "Dimensions-Scenarios-Disciplines" matrix to guide data generation and model optimization. MR-RML introduces three core innovations: (1) a "Dimensions-Scenarios-Disciplines" medical standard system that embeds domain standards into the full training pipeline; (2) an independent multi-dimensional reward model that decomposes evaluation criteria, shifting from real-time rubric-based scoring to internalized reward modeling for improved consistency and cost-efficiency; (3) geometric projection reference constraints that transform medical cognitive logic into mathematical regularization, aligning scoring gradients with clinical reasoning and enabling synthetic data-driven training. Through extensive evaluations on the authoritative medical benchmark Healthbench, our method yields substantial performance gains over the base LLM Qwen-32B (45% on the full subset and 85% on Hard subset, respectively). It achieves a SOTA among open-source LLMs with scores of 62.7 (full subset) and 44.7 (hard subset), while also outperforming the majority of closed-source models.

Scientific Large Language Models (Sci-LLMs) are transforming how knowledge is represented, integrated, and applied in scientific research, yet their progress is shaped by the complex nature of scientific data. This survey presents a comprehensive, data-centric synthesis that reframes the development of Sci-LLMs as a co-evolution between models and their underlying data substrate. We formulate a unified taxonomy of scientific data and a hierarchical model of scientific knowledge, emphasizing the multimodal, cross-scale, and domain-specific challenges that differentiate scientific corpora from general natural language processing datasets. We systematically review recent Sci-LLMs, from general-purpose foundations to specialized models across diverse scientific disciplines, alongside an extensive analysis of over 270 pre-/post-training datasets, showing why Sci-LLMs pose distinct demands -- heterogeneous, multi-scale, uncertainty-laden corpora that require representations preserving domain invariance and enabling cross-modal reasoning. On evaluation, we examine over 190 benchmark datasets and trace a shift from static exams toward process- and discovery-oriented assessments with advanced evaluation protocols. These data-centric analyses highlight persistent issues in scientific data development and discuss emerging solutions involving semi-automated annotation pipelines and expert validation. Finally, we outline a paradigm shift toward closed-loop systems where autonomous agents based on Sci-LLMs actively experiment, validate, and contribute to a living, evolving knowledge base. Collectively, this work provides a roadmap for building trustworthy, continually evolving artificial intelligence (AI) systems that function as a true partner in accelerating scientific discovery.

Mathematical reasoning, a core aspect of human cognition, is vital across many domains, from educational problem-solving to scientific advancements. As artificial general intelligence (AGI) progresses, integrating large language models (LLMs) with mathematical reasoning tasks is becoming increasingly significant. This survey provides the first comprehensive analysis of mathematical reasoning in the era of multimodal large language models (MLLMs). We review over 200 studies published since 2021, and examine the state-of-the-art developments in Math-LLMs, with a focus on multimodal settings. We categorize the field into three dimensions: benchmarks, methodologies, and challenges. In particular, we explore multimodal mathematical reasoning pipeline, as well as the role of (M)LLMs and the associated methodologies. Finally, we identify five major challenges hindering the realization of AGI in this domain, offering insights into the future direction for enhancing multimodal reasoning capabilities. This survey serves as a critical resource for the research community in advancing the capabilities of LLMs to tackle complex multimodal reasoning tasks.

Reasoning is central to human intelligence, enabling structured problem-solving across diverse tasks. Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have greatly enhanced their reasoning abilities in arithmetic, commonsense, and symbolic domains. However, effectively extending these capabilities into multimodal contexts-where models must integrate both visual and textual inputs-continues to be a significant challenge. Multimodal reasoning introduces complexities, such as handling conflicting information across modalities, which require models to adopt advanced interpretative strategies. Addressing these challenges involves not only sophisticated algorithms but also robust methodologies for evaluating reasoning accuracy and coherence. This paper offers a concise yet insightful overview of reasoning techniques in both textual and multimodal LLMs. Through a thorough and up-to-date comparison, we clearly formulate core reasoning challenges and opportunities, highlighting practical methods for post-training optimization and test-time inference. Our work provides valuable insights and guidance, bridging theoretical frameworks and practical implementations, and sets clear directions for future research.

Logical reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence and an essential capability for multimodal large language models (MLLMs). Despite the significant advancement in multimodal reasoning, existing benchmarks fail to comprehensively evaluate their reasoning abilities due to the lack of explicit categorization for logical reasoning types and an unclear understanding of reasoning. To address these issues, we introduce MME-Reasoning, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the reasoning ability of MLLMs, which covers all three types of reasoning (i.e., inductive, deductive, and abductive) in its questions. We carefully curate the data to ensure that each question effectively evaluates reasoning ability rather than perceptual skills or knowledge breadth, and extend the evaluation protocols to cover the evaluation of diverse questions. Our evaluation reveals substantial limitations of state-of-the-art MLLMs when subjected to holistic assessments of logical reasoning capabilities. Even the most advanced MLLMs show limited performance in comprehensive logical reasoning, with notable performance imbalances across reasoning types. In addition, we conducted an in-depth analysis of approaches such as ``thinking mode'' and Rule-based RL, which are commonly believed to enhance reasoning abilities. These findings highlight the critical limitations and performance imbalances of current MLLMs in diverse logical reasoning scenarios, providing comprehensive and systematic insights into the understanding and evaluation of reasoning capabilities.

We present Hermes 4, a family of hybrid reasoning models that combine structured, multi-turn reasoning with broad instruction-following ability. We describe the challenges encountered during data curation, synthesis, training, and evaluation, and outline the solutions employed to address these challenges at scale. We comprehensively evaluate across mathematical reasoning, coding, knowledge, comprehension, and alignment benchmarks, and we report both quantitative performance and qualitative behavioral analysis. To support open research, all model weights are published publicly at https://huggingface.co/collections/NousResearch/hermes-4-collection-68a731bfd452e20816725728

Inspired by recent advancements in LLM reasoning, the field of multimodal reasoning has seen remarkable progress, achieving significant performance gains on intricate tasks such as mathematical problem-solving. Despite this progress, current multimodal large reasoning models exhibit two key limitations. They tend to employ computationally expensive reasoning even for simple queries, leading to inefficiency. Furthermore, this focus on specialized reasoning often impairs their broader, more general understanding capabilities. In this paper, we propose Metis-HOME: a Hybrid Optimized Mixture-of-Experts framework designed to address this trade-off. Metis-HOME enables a ''Hybrid Thinking'' paradigm by structuring the original dense model into two distinct expert branches: a thinking branch tailored for complex, multi-step reasoning, and a non-thinking branch optimized for rapid, direct inference on tasks like general VQA and OCR. A lightweight, trainable router dynamically allocates queries to the most suitable expert. We instantiate Metis-HOME by adapting the Qwen2.5-VL-7B into an MoE architecture. Comprehensive evaluations reveal that our approach not only substantially enhances complex reasoning abilities but also improves the model's general capabilities, reversing the degradation trend observed in other reasoning-specialized models. Our work establishes a new paradigm for building powerful and versatile MLLMs, effectively resolving the prevalent reasoning-vs-generalization dilemma.

Modern systems for multi-hop question answering (QA) typically break questions into a sequence of reasoning steps, termed chain-of-thought (CoT), before arriving at a final answer. Often, multiple chains are sampled and aggregated through a voting mechanism over the final answers, but the intermediate steps themselves are discarded. While such approaches improve performance, they do not consider the relations between intermediate steps across chains and do not provide a unified explanation for the predicted answer. We introduce Multi-Chain Reasoning (MCR), an approach which prompts large language models to meta-reason over multiple chains of thought, rather than aggregating their answers. MCR examines different reasoning chains, mixes information between them and selects the most relevant facts in generating an explanation and predicting the answer. MCR outperforms strong baselines on 7 multi-hop QA datasets. Moreover, our analysis reveals that MCR explanations exhibit high quality, enabling humans to verify its answers.

Scientific problem solving poses unique challenges for LLMs, requiring both deep domain knowledge and the ability to apply such knowledge through complex reasoning. While automated scientific reasoners hold great promise for assisting human scientists, there is currently no widely adopted holistic benchmark for evaluating scientific reasoning, and few approaches systematically disentangle the distinct roles of knowledge and reasoning in these tasks. To address these gaps, we introduce SciReas, a diverse suite of existing benchmarks for scientific reasoning tasks, and SciReas-Pro, a selective subset that requires more complex reasoning. Our holistic evaluation surfaces insights about scientific reasoning performance that remain hidden when relying on individual benchmarks alone. We then propose KRUX, a probing framework for studying the distinct roles of reasoning and knowledge in scientific tasks. Combining the two, we conduct an in-depth analysis that yields several key findings: (1) Retrieving task-relevant knowledge from model parameters is a critical bottleneck for LLMs in scientific reasoning; (2) Reasoning models consistently benefit from external knowledge added in-context on top of the reasoning enhancement; (3) Enhancing verbalized reasoning improves LLMs' ability to surface task-relevant knowledge. Finally, we conduct a lightweight analysis, comparing our science-focused data composition with concurrent efforts on long CoT SFT, and release SciLit01, a strong 8B baseline for scientific reasoning.

Exploiting large language models (LLMs) to tackle deductive reasoning has garnered growing attention. It still remains highly challenging to achieve satisfactory results in complex deductive problems, characterized by plenty of premises (i.e., facts or rules) entailing intricate relationships among entities and requiring multi-hop reasoning. One intuitive solution is to decompose the original task into smaller sub-tasks, and then chain the multiple casual reasoning steps together in a forward (e.g., Selection-Inference) or backward (e.g., LAMBADA) direction. However, these techniques inevitably necessitate a large number of overall stages, leading to computationally expensive operations and a higher possibility of making misleading steps. In addition to stage-by-stage decomposition, we draw inspiration from another aspect of human problem-solving. Humans tend to distill the most relevant information and organize their thoughts systematically (e.g., creating mind maps), which assists them in answering questions or drawing conclusions precisely and quickly. In light of this, we propose a novel reasoning approach named Concise and Organized Perception (COP). COP carefully analyzes the given statements to efficiently identify the most pertinent information while eliminating redundancy. It then prompts the LLMs in a more organized form that adapts to the model's inference process. By perceiving concise and organized proofs, the deductive reasoning abilities of LLMs can be better elicited, and the risk of acquiring errors caused by excessive reasoning stages is mitigated. Furthermore, our approach can be combined with the aforementioned ones to further boost their performance. Extensive experimental results on three popular deductive benchmarks (i.e., ProofWriter, PrOntoQA and PrOntoQA-OOD) show that COP significantly outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods.

Reasoning is a fundamental aspect of human intelligence that plays a crucial role in activities such as problem solving, decision making, and critical thinking. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have made significant progress in natural language processing, and there is observation that these models may exhibit reasoning abilities when they are sufficiently large. However, it is not yet clear to what extent LLMs are capable of reasoning. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of the current state of knowledge on reasoning in LLMs, including techniques for improving and eliciting reasoning in these models, methods and benchmarks for evaluating reasoning abilities, findings and implications of previous research in this field, and suggestions on future directions. Our aim is to provide a detailed and up-to-date review of this topic and stimulate meaningful discussion and future work.

Reasoning, a crucial ability for complex problem-solving, plays a pivotal role in various real-world settings such as negotiation, medical diagnosis, and criminal investigation. It serves as a fundamental methodology in the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). With the ongoing development of foundation models, e.g., Large Language Models (LLMs), there is a growing interest in exploring their abilities in reasoning tasks. In this paper, we introduce seminal foundation models proposed or adaptable for reasoning, highlighting the latest advancements in various reasoning tasks, methods, and benchmarks. We then delve into the potential future directions behind the emergence of reasoning abilities within foundation models. We also discuss the relevance of multimodal learning, autonomous agents, and super alignment in the context of reasoning. By discussing these future research directions, we hope to inspire researchers in their exploration of this field, stimulate further advancements in reasoning with foundation models, and contribute to the development of AGI.

Recent advances in Multi-Modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have enabled unified processing of language, vision, and structured inputs, opening the door to complex tasks such as logical deduction, spatial reasoning, and scientific analysis. Despite their promise, the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs, particularly those augmented with intermediate thinking traces (MLLMs-T), remain poorly understood and lack standardized evaluation benchmarks. Existing work focuses primarily on perception or final answer correctness, offering limited insight into how models reason or fail across modalities. To address this gap, we introduce the MMMR, a new benchmark designed to rigorously evaluate multi-modal reasoning with explicit thinking. The MMMR comprises 1) a high-difficulty dataset of 1,083 questions spanning six diverse reasoning types with symbolic depth and multi-hop demands and 2) a modular Reasoning Trace Evaluation Pipeline (RTEP) for assessing reasoning quality beyond accuracy through metrics like relevance, consistency, and structured error annotations. Empirical results show that MLLMs-T overall outperform non-thinking counterparts, but even top models like Claude-3.7-Sonnet and Gemini-2.5 Pro suffer from reasoning pathologies such as inconsistency and overthinking. This benchmark reveals persistent gaps between accuracy and reasoning quality and provides an actionable evaluation pipeline for future model development. Overall, the MMMR offers a scalable foundation for evaluating, comparing, and improving the next generation of multi-modal reasoning systems.

Scaling up language models to billions of parameters has opened up possibilities for in-context learning, allowing instruction tuning and few-shot learning on tasks that the model was not specifically trained for. This has achieved breakthrough performance on language tasks such as translation, summarization, and question-answering. Furthermore, in addition to these associative "System 1" tasks, recent advances in Chain-of-thought prompt learning have demonstrated strong "System 2" reasoning abilities, answering a question in the field of artificial general intelligence whether LLMs can reason. The field started with the question whether LLMs can solve grade school math word problems. This paper reviews the rapidly expanding field of prompt-based reasoning with LLMs. Our taxonomy identifies different ways to generate, evaluate, and control multi-step reasoning. We provide an in-depth coverage of core approaches and open problems, and we propose a research agenda for the near future. Finally, we highlight the relation between reasoning and prompt-based learning, and we discuss the relation between reasoning, sequential decision processes, and reinforcement learning. We find that self-improvement, self-reflection, and some metacognitive abilities of the reasoning processes are possible through the judicious use of prompts. True self-improvement and self-reasoning, to go from reasoning with LLMs to reasoning by LLMs, remains future work.

Recent advancements in reasoning-reinforced Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning tasks. However, the mechanism underlying their utilization of different human reasoning skills remains poorly investigated, especially for multilingual commonsense reasoning that involves everyday knowledge across different languages and cultures. To address this gap, we propose a Multilingual and Scalable Benchmark for Skill-based Commonsense Reasoning (mSCoRe). Our benchmark incorporates three key components that are designed to systematically evaluate LLM's reasoning capabilities, including: (1) a novel taxonomy of reasoning skills that enables fine-grained analysis of models' reasoning processes, (2) a robust data synthesis pipeline tailored specifically for commonsense reasoning evaluation, and (3) a complexity scaling framework allowing task difficulty to scale dynamically alongside future improvements in LLM abilities. Extensive experiments on eights state-of-the-art LLMs of varying sizes and training approaches demonstrate that mSCoRe remains significantly challenging for current models, particularly at higher complexity levels. Our results reveal the limitations of such reasoning-reinforced models when confronted with nuanced multilingual general and cultural commonsense. We further provide detailed analysis on the models' reasoning processes, suggesting future directions for improving multilingual commonsense reasoning capabilities.

Although contemporary large language models (LMs) demonstrate impressive question-answering capabilities, their answers are typically the product of a single call to the model. This entails an unwelcome degree of opacity and compromises performance, especially on problems that are inherently multi-step. To address these limitations, we show how LMs can be made to perform faithful multi-step reasoning via a process whose causal structure mirrors the underlying logical structure of the problem. Our approach works by chaining together reasoning steps, where each step results from calls to two fine-tuned LMs, one for selection and one for inference, to produce a valid reasoning trace. Our method carries out a beam search through the space of reasoning traces to improve reasoning quality. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our model on multi-step logical deduction and scientific question-answering, showing that it outperforms baselines on final answer accuracy, and generates humanly interpretable reasoning traces whose validity can be checked by the user.

We present a scientific reasoning foundation model that aligns natural language with heterogeneous scientific representations. The model is pretrained on a 206B-token corpus spanning scientific text, pure sequences, and sequence-text pairs, then aligned via SFT on 40M instructions, annealed cold-start bootstrapping to elicit long-form chain-of-thought, and reinforcement learning with task-specific reward shaping, which instills deliberate scientific reasoning. It supports four capability families, covering up to 103 tasks across workflows: (i) faithful translation between text and scientific formats, (ii) text/knowledge extraction, (iii) property prediction, (iv) property classification, (v) unconditional and conditional sequence generation and design. Compared with specialist systems, our approach broadens instruction coverage, improves cross-domain generalization, and enhances fidelity. We detail data curation and training and show that cross-discipline learning strengthens transfer and downstream reliability. The model, instruct tuning datasets and the evaluation code are open-sourced at https://huggingface.co/SciReason and https://github.com/open-sciencelab/SciReason.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in natural language tasks but still face challenges in Question Answering (QA) tasks requiring complex, multi-step reasoning. We outline the types of reasoning required in some of these tasks, and reframe them in terms of meta-level reasoning (akin to high-level strategic reasoning or planning) and object-level reasoning (embodied in lower-level tasks such as mathematical reasoning). Franklin, a novel dataset with requirements of meta- and object-level reasoning, is introduced and used along with three other datasets to evaluate four LLMs at question answering tasks requiring multiple steps of reasoning. Results from human annotation studies suggest LLMs demonstrate meta-level reasoning with high frequency, but struggle with object-level reasoning tasks in some of the datasets used. Additionally, evidence suggests that LLMs find the object-level reasoning required for the questions in the Franklin dataset challenging, yet they do exhibit strong performance with respect to the meta-level reasoning requirements.

Reasoning lies at the heart of intelligence, shaping the ability to make decisions, draw conclusions, and generalize across domains. In artificial intelligence, as systems increasingly operate in open, uncertain, and multimodal environments, reasoning becomes essential for enabling robust and adaptive behavior. Large Multimodal Reasoning Models (LMRMs) have emerged as a promising paradigm, integrating modalities such as text, images, audio, and video to support complex reasoning capabilities and aiming to achieve comprehensive perception, precise understanding, and deep reasoning. As research advances, multimodal reasoning has rapidly evolved from modular, perception-driven pipelines to unified, language-centric frameworks that offer more coherent cross-modal understanding. While instruction tuning and reinforcement learning have improved model reasoning, significant challenges remain in omni-modal generalization, reasoning depth, and agentic behavior. To address these issues, we present a comprehensive and structured survey of multimodal reasoning research, organized around a four-stage developmental roadmap that reflects the field's shifting design philosophies and emerging capabilities. First, we review early efforts based on task-specific modules, where reasoning was implicitly embedded across stages of representation, alignment, and fusion. Next, we examine recent approaches that unify reasoning into multimodal LLMs, with advances such as Multimodal Chain-of-Thought (MCoT) and multimodal reinforcement learning enabling richer and more structured reasoning chains. Finally, drawing on empirical insights from challenging benchmarks and experimental cases of OpenAI O3 and O4-mini, we discuss the conceptual direction of native large multimodal reasoning models (N-LMRMs), which aim to support scalable, agentic, and adaptive reasoning and planning in complex, real-world environments.

This survey paper proposes a clearer view of natural language reasoning in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), both conceptually and practically. Conceptually, we provide a distinct definition for natural language reasoning in NLP, based on both philosophy and NLP scenarios, discuss what types of tasks require reasoning, and introduce a taxonomy of reasoning. Practically, we conduct a comprehensive literature review on natural language reasoning in NLP, mainly covering classical logical reasoning, natural language inference, multi-hop question answering, and commonsense reasoning. The paper also identifies and views backward reasoning, a powerful paradigm for multi-step reasoning, and introduces defeasible reasoning as one of the most important future directions in natural language reasoning research. We focus on single-modality unstructured natural language text, excluding neuro-symbolic techniques and mathematical reasoning.

Large Language Models (LLMs), despite their remarkable capabilities, rely on singular, pre-dominant reasoning paradigms, hindering their performance on intricate problems that demand diverse cognitive strategies. To address this, we introduce Composite Reasoning (CR), a novel reasoning approach empowering LLMs to dynamically explore and combine multiple reasoning styles like deductive, inductive, and abductive for more nuanced problem-solving. Evaluated on scientific and medical question-answering benchmarks, our approach outperforms existing baselines like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and also surpasses the accuracy of DeepSeek-R1 style reasoning (SR) capabilities, while demonstrating superior sample efficiency and adequate token usage. Notably, CR adaptively emphasizes domain-appropriate reasoning styles. It prioritizes abductive and deductive reasoning for medical question answering, but shifts to causal, deductive, and inductive methods for scientific reasoning. Our findings highlight that by cultivating internal reasoning style diversity, LLMs acquire more robust, adaptive, and efficient problem-solving abilities.

Deductive reasoning is a crucial logical capability that assists us in solving complex problems based on existing knowledge. Although augmented by Chain-of-Thought prompts, Large Language Models (LLMs) might not follow the correct reasoning paths. Enhancing the deductive reasoning abilities of LLMs, and leveraging their extensive built-in knowledge for various reasoning tasks, remains an open question. Attempting to mimic the human deductive reasoning paradigm, we propose a multi-stage Syllogistic-Reasoning Framework of Thought (SR-FoT) that enables LLMs to perform syllogistic deductive reasoning to handle complex knowledge-based reasoning tasks. Our SR-FoT begins by interpreting the question and then uses the interpretation and the original question to propose a suitable major premise. It proceeds by generating and answering minor premise questions in two stages to match the minor premises. Finally, it guides LLMs to use the previously generated major and minor premises to perform syllogistic deductive reasoning to derive the answer to the original question. Extensive and thorough experiments on knowledge-based reasoning tasks have demonstrated the effectiveness and advantages of our SR-FoT.

State-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs) are accredited with an increasing number of different capabilities, ranging from reading comprehension, over advanced mathematical and reasoning skills to possessing scientific knowledge. In this paper we focus on their multi-hop reasoning capability: the ability to identify and integrate information from multiple textual sources. Given the concerns with the presence of simplifying cues in existing multi-hop reasoning benchmarks, which allow models to circumvent the reasoning requirement, we set out to investigate, whether LLMs are prone to exploiting such simplifying cues. We find evidence that they indeed circumvent the requirement to perform multi-hop reasoning, but they do so in more subtle ways than what was reported about their fine-tuned pre-trained language model (PLM) predecessors. Motivated by this finding, we propose a challenging multi-hop reasoning benchmark, by generating seemingly plausible multi-hop reasoning chains, which ultimately lead to incorrect answers. We evaluate multiple open and proprietary state-of-the-art LLMs, and find that their performance to perform multi-hop reasoning is affected, as indicated by up to 45% relative decrease in F1 score when presented with such seemingly plausible alternatives. We conduct a deeper analysis and find evidence that while LLMs tend to ignore misleading lexical cues, misleading reasoning paths indeed present a significant challenge.

Mathematical reasoning remains one of the most challenging domains for large language models (LLMs), requiring not only linguistic understanding but also structured logical deduction and numerical precision. While recent LLMs demonstrate strong general-purpose reasoning abilities, their mathematical competence across diverse languages remains underexplored. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on English or a narrow subset of high-resource languages, leaving significant gaps in assessing multilingual and cross-lingual mathematical reasoning. To address this, we introduce MathMist, a parallel multilingual benchmark for mathematical problem solving and reasoning. MathMist encompasses over 21K aligned question-answer pairs across seven languages, representing a balanced coverage of high-, medium-, and low-resource linguistic settings. The dataset captures linguistic variety, multiple types of problem settings, and solution synthesizing capabilities. We systematically evaluate a diverse suite of models, including open-source small and medium LLMs, proprietary systems, and multilingual-reasoning-focused models, under zero-shot, chain-of-thought (CoT), and code-switched reasoning paradigms. Our results reveal persistent deficiencies in LLMs' ability to perform consistent and interpretable mathematical reasoning across languages, with pronounced degradation in low-resource settings. All the codes and data are available at GitHub: https://github.com/mahbubhimel/MathMist

Large Language Models (LLMs) have succeeded remarkably in various natural language processing (NLP) tasks, yet their reasoning capabilities remain a fundamental challenge. While LLMs exhibit impressive fluency and factual recall, their ability to perform complex reasoning-spanning logical deduction, mathematical problem-solving, commonsense inference, and multi-step reasoning-often falls short of human expectations. This survey provides a comprehensive review of emerging techniques enhancing reasoning in LLMs. We categorize existing methods into key approaches, including prompting strategies (e.g., Chain-of-Thought reasoning, Self-Consistency, and Tree-of-Thought reasoning), architectural innovations (e.g., retrieval-augmented models, modular reasoning networks, and neuro-symbolic integration), and learning paradigms (e.g., fine-tuning with reasoning-specific datasets, reinforcement learning, and self-supervised reasoning objectives). Additionally, we explore evaluation frameworks used to assess reasoning in LLMs and highlight open challenges, such as hallucinations, robustness, and reasoning generalization across diverse tasks. By synthesizing recent advancements, this survey aims to provide insights into promising directions for future research and practical applications of reasoning-augmented LLMs.

Multi-hop reasoning (i.e., reasoning across two or more documents) is a key ingredient for NLP models that leverage large corpora to exhibit broad knowledge. To retrieve evidence passages, multi-hop models must contend with a fast-growing search space across the hops, represent complex queries that combine multiple information needs, and resolve ambiguity about the best order in which to hop between training passages. We tackle these problems via Baleen, a system that improves the accuracy of multi-hop retrieval while learning robustly from weak training signals in the many-hop setting. To tame the search space, we propose condensed retrieval, a pipeline that summarizes the retrieved passages after each hop into a single compact context. To model complex queries, we introduce a focused late interaction retriever that allows different parts of the same query representation to match disparate relevant passages. Lastly, to infer the hopping dependencies among unordered training passages, we devise latent hop ordering, a weak-supervision strategy in which the trained retriever itself selects the sequence of hops. We evaluate Baleen on retrieval for two-hop question answering and many-hop claim verification, establishing state-of-the-art performance.

Composing knowledge from multiple pieces of texts is a key challenge in multi-hop question answering. We present a multi-hop reasoning dataset, Question Answering via Sentence Composition(QASC), that requires retrieving facts from a large corpus and composing them to answer a multiple-choice question. QASC is the first dataset to offer two desirable properties: (a) the facts to be composed are annotated in a large corpus, and (b) the decomposition into these facts is not evident from the question itself. The latter makes retrieval challenging as the system must introduce new concepts or relations in order to discover potential decompositions. Further, the reasoning model must then learn to identify valid compositions of these retrieved facts using common-sense reasoning. To help address these challenges, we provide annotation for supporting facts as well as their composition. Guided by these annotations, we present a two-step approach to mitigate the retrieval challenges. We use other multiple-choice datasets as additional training data to strengthen the reasoning model. Our proposed approach improves over current state-of-the-art language models by 11% (absolute). The reasoning and retrieval problems, however, remain unsolved as this model still lags by 20% behind human performance.

With the exponential growth of research facilitated by modern technology and improved accessibility, scientific discoveries have become increasingly fragmented within and across fields. This makes it challenging to assess the significance, novelty, incremental findings, and equivalent ideas between related works, particularly those from different research communities. Large language models (LLMs) have recently demonstrated strong quantitative and qualitative reasoning abilities, and multi-agent LLM debates have shown promise in handling complex reasoning tasks by exploring diverse perspectives and reasoning paths. Inspired by this, we introduce Tree-of-Debate (ToD), a framework which converts scientific papers into LLM personas that debate their respective novelties. To emphasize structured, critical reasoning rather than focusing solely on outcomes, ToD dynamically constructs a debate tree, enabling fine-grained analysis of independent novelty arguments within scholarly articles. Through experiments on scientific literature across various domains, evaluated by expert researchers, we demonstrate that ToD generates informative arguments, effectively contrasts papers, and supports researchers in their literature review.

In this work, we use large language models (LLMs) to augment and accelerate research on the P versus NP problem, one of the most important open problems in theoretical computer science and mathematics. Specifically, we propose Socratic reasoning, a general framework that promotes in-depth thinking with LLMs for complex problem-solving. Socratic reasoning encourages LLMs to recursively discover, solve, and integrate problems while facilitating self-evaluation and refinement. Our pilot study on the P vs. NP problem shows that GPT-4 successfully produces a proof schema and engages in rigorous reasoning throughout 97 dialogue turns, concluding "P neq NP", which is in alignment with (Xu and Zhou, 2023). The investigation uncovers novel insights within the extensive solution space of LLMs, shedding light on LLM for Science.

With the emergence of advanced reasoning models like OpenAI o3 and DeepSeek-R1, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities. However, their ability to perform rigorous logical reasoning remains an open question. This survey synthesizes recent advancements in logical reasoning within LLMs, a critical area of AI research. It outlines the scope of logical reasoning in LLMs, its theoretical foundations, and the benchmarks used to evaluate reasoning proficiency. We analyze existing capabilities across different reasoning paradigms - deductive, inductive, abductive, and analogical - and assess strategies to enhance reasoning performance, including data-centric tuning, reinforcement learning, decoding strategies, and neuro-symbolic approaches. The review concludes with future directions, emphasizing the need for further exploration to strengthen logical reasoning in AI systems.

Rule-based reasoning, a fundamental type of legal reasoning, enables us to draw conclusions by accurately applying a rule to a set of facts. We explore causal language models as rule-based reasoners, specifically with respect to compositional rules - rules consisting of multiple elements which form a complex logical expression. Reasoning about compositional rules is challenging because it requires multiple reasoning steps, and attending to the logical relationships between elements. We introduce a new prompting method, Chain of Logic, which elicits rule-based reasoning through decomposition (solving elements as independent threads of logic), and recomposition (recombining these sub-answers to resolve the underlying logical expression). This method was inspired by the IRAC (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion) framework, a sequential reasoning approach used by lawyers. We evaluate chain of logic across eight rule-based reasoning tasks involving three distinct compositional rules from the LegalBench benchmark and demonstrate it consistently outperforms other prompting methods, including chain of thought and self-ask, using open-source and commercial language models.

With the continuous advancement of large language models (LLMs), it is essential to create new benchmarks to effectively evaluate their expanding capabilities and identify areas for improvement. This work focuses on multi-image reasoning, an emerging capability in state-of-the-art LLMs. We introduce ReMI, a dataset designed to assess LLMs' ability to Reason with Multiple Images. This dataset encompasses a diverse range of tasks, spanning various reasoning domains such as math, physics, logic, code, table/chart understanding, and spatial and temporal reasoning. It also covers a broad spectrum of characteristics found in multi-image reasoning scenarios. We have benchmarked several cutting-edge LLMs using ReMI and found a substantial gap between their performance and human-level proficiency. This highlights the challenges in multi-image reasoning and the need for further research. Our analysis also reveals the strengths and weaknesses of different models, shedding light on the types of reasoning that are currently attainable and areas where future models require improvement. To foster further research in this area, we are releasing ReMI publicly: https://huggingface.co/datasets/mehrankazemi/ReMI.

Achieving human-level intelligence requires refining the transition from the fast, intuitive System 1 to the slower, more deliberate System 2 reasoning. While System 1 excels in quick, heuristic decisions, System 2 relies on logical reasoning for more accurate judgments and reduced biases. Foundational Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at fast decision-making but lack the depth for complex reasoning, as they have not yet fully embraced the step-by-step analysis characteristic of true System 2 thinking. Recently, reasoning LLMs like OpenAI's o1/o3 and DeepSeek's R1 have demonstrated expert-level performance in fields such as mathematics and coding, closely mimicking the deliberate reasoning of System 2 and showcasing human-like cognitive abilities. This survey begins with a brief overview of the progress in foundational LLMs and the early development of System 2 technologies, exploring how their combination has paved the way for reasoning LLMs. Next, we discuss how to construct reasoning LLMs, analyzing their features, the core methods enabling advanced reasoning, and the evolution of various reasoning LLMs. Additionally, we provide an overview of reasoning benchmarks, offering an in-depth comparison of the performance of representative reasoning LLMs. Finally, we explore promising directions for advancing reasoning LLMs and maintain a real-time https://github.com/zzli2022/Awesome-Slow-Reason-System{GitHub Repository} to track the latest developments. We hope this survey will serve as a valuable resource to inspire innovation and drive progress in this rapidly evolving field.

Reasoning is central to a wide range of intellectual activities, and while the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, their performance in reasoning tasks remains limited. The processes and mechanisms underlying reasoning are not yet fully understood, but key elements include path exploration, selection of relevant knowledge, and multi-step inference. Problems are solved through the synthesis of these components. In this paper, we propose a benchmark that focuses on a specific aspect of reasoning ability: the direct evaluation of multi-step inference. To this end, we design a special reasoning task where multi-step inference is specifically focused by largely eliminating path exploration and implicit knowledge utilization. Our dataset comprises pairs of explicit instructions and corresponding questions, where the procedures necessary for solving the questions are entirely detailed within the instructions. This setup allows models to solve problems solely by following the provided directives. By constructing problems that require varying numbers of steps to solve and evaluating responses at each step, we enable a thorough assessment of state-of-the-art LLMs' ability to follow instructions. To ensure the robustness of our evaluation, we include multiple distinct tasks. Furthermore, by comparing accuracy across tasks, utilizing step-aware metrics, and applying separately defined measures of complexity, we conduct experiments that offer insights into the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in reasoning tasks. Our findings have significant implications for the development of LLMs and highlight areas for future research in advancing their reasoning abilities. Our dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/ifujisawa/procbench and code at https://github.com/ifujisawa/proc-bench.

Current multimodal benchmarks often conflate reasoning with domain-specific knowledge, making it difficult to isolate and evaluate general reasoning abilities in non-expert settings. To address this, we introduce VisualPuzzles, a benchmark that targets visual reasoning while deliberately minimizing reliance on specialized knowledge. VisualPuzzles consists of diverse questions spanning five categories: algorithmic, analogical, deductive, inductive, and spatial reasoning. One major source of our questions is manually translated logical reasoning questions from the Chinese Civil Service Examination. Experiments show that VisualPuzzles requires significantly less intensive domain-specific knowledge and more complex reasoning compared to benchmarks like MMMU, enabling us to better evaluate genuine multimodal reasoning. Evaluations show that state-of-the-art multimodal large language models consistently lag behind human performance on VisualPuzzles, and that strong performance on knowledge-intensive benchmarks does not necessarily translate to success on reasoning-focused, knowledge-light tasks. Additionally, reasoning enhancements such as scaling up inference compute (with "thinking" modes) yield inconsistent gains across models and task types, and we observe no clear correlation between model size and performance. We also found that models exhibit different reasoning and answering patterns on VisualPuzzles compared to benchmarks with heavier emphasis on knowledge. VisualPuzzles offers a clearer lens through which to evaluate reasoning capabilities beyond factual recall and domain knowledge.

Recent advancements in reasoning with large language models (RLLMs), such as OpenAI-O1 and DeepSeek-R1, have demonstrated their impressive capabilities in complex domains like mathematics and coding. A central factor in their success lies in the application of long chain-of-thought (Long CoT) characteristics, which enhance reasoning abilities and enable the solution of intricate problems. However, despite these developments, a comprehensive survey on Long CoT is still lacking, limiting our understanding of its distinctions from traditional short chain-of-thought (Short CoT) and complicating ongoing debates on issues like "overthinking" and "test-time scaling." This survey seeks to fill this gap by offering a unified perspective on Long CoT. (1) We first distinguish Long CoT from Short CoT and introduce a novel taxonomy to categorize current reasoning paradigms. (2) Next, we explore the key characteristics of Long CoT: deep reasoning, extensive exploration, and feasible reflection, which enable models to handle more complex tasks and produce more efficient, coherent outcomes compared to the shallower Short CoT. (3) We then investigate key phenomena such as the emergence of Long CoT with these characteristics, including overthinking, and test-time scaling, offering insights into how these processes manifest in practice. (4) Finally, we identify significant research gaps and highlight promising future directions, including the integration of multi-modal reasoning, efficiency improvements, and enhanced knowledge frameworks. By providing a structured overview, this survey aims to inspire future research and further the development of logical reasoning in artificial intelligence.

Recent scholarship on reasoning in LLMs has supplied evidence of impressive performance and flexible adaptation to machine generated or human feedback. Nonmonotonic reasoning, crucial to human cognition for navigating the real world, remains a challenging, yet understudied task. In this work, we study nonmonotonic reasoning capabilities of seven state-of-the-art LLMs in one abstract and one commonsense reasoning task featuring generics, such as 'Birds fly', and exceptions, 'Penguins don't fly' (see Fig. 1). While LLMs exhibit reasoning patterns in accordance with human nonmonotonic reasoning abilities, they fail to maintain stable beliefs on truth conditions of generics at the addition of supporting examples ('Owls fly') or unrelated information ('Lions have manes'). Our findings highlight pitfalls in attributing human reasoning behaviours to LLMs, as well as assessing general capabilities, while consistent reasoning remains elusive.

Recently, there have been notable advancements in large language models (LLMs), demonstrating their growing abilities in complex reasoning. However, existing research largely overlooks a thorough and systematic comparison of these models' reasoning processes and outputs, particularly regarding their self-reflection pattern (also termed "Aha moment") and the interconnections across diverse domains. This paper proposes a novel framework for analyzing the reasoning characteristics of four cutting-edge large reasoning models (GPT-o1, DeepSeek-R1, Kimi-k1.5, and Grok-3) using keywords statistic and LLM-as-a-judge paradigm. Our approach connects their internal thinking processes with their final outputs. A diverse dataset consists of real-world scenario-based questions covering logical deduction, causal inference, and multi-step problem-solving. Additionally, a set of metrics is put forward to assess both the coherence of reasoning and the accuracy of the outputs. The research results uncover various patterns of how these models balance exploration and exploitation, deal with problems, and reach conclusions during the reasoning process. Through quantitative and qualitative comparisons, disparities among these models are identified in aspects such as the depth of reasoning, the reliance on intermediate steps, and the degree of similarity between their thinking processes and output patterns and those of GPT-o1. This work offers valuable insights into the trade-off between computational efficiency and reasoning robustness and provides practical recommendations for enhancing model design and evaluation in practical applications. We publicly release our project at: https://github.com/ChangWenhan/FromThinking2Output

Large language models (LLMs) solve complex problems yet fail on simpler variants, suggesting they achieve correct outputs through mechanisms fundamentally different from human reasoning. To understand this gap, we synthesize cognitive science research into a taxonomy of 28 cognitive elements spanning reasoning invariants, meta-cognitive controls, representations for organizing reasoning & knowledge, and transformation operations. We introduce a fine-grained evaluation framework and conduct the first large-scale empirical analysis of 192K traces from 18 models across text, vision, and audio, complemented by 54 human think-aloud traces, which we make publicly available. We find that models under-utilize cognitive elements correlated with success, narrowing to rigid sequential processing on ill-structured problems where diverse representations and meta-cognitive monitoring are critical. Human traces show more abstraction and conceptual processing, while models default to surface-level enumeration. Meta-analysis of 1.6K LLM reasoning papers reveals the research community concentrates on easily quantifiable elements (sequential organization: 55%, decomposition: 60%) but neglecting meta-cognitive controls (self-awareness: 16%) that correlate with success. Models possess behavioral repertoires associated with success but fail to deploy them spontaneously. Leveraging these patterns, we develop test-time reasoning guidance that automatically scaffold successful structures, improving performance by up to 66.7% on complex problems. By establishing a shared vocabulary between cognitive science and LLM research, our framework enables systematic diagnosis of reasoning failures and principled development of models that reason through robust cognitive mechanisms rather than spurious shortcuts, while providing tools to test theories of human cognition at scale.

Recently, slow-thinking reasoning systems, such as o1, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in solving complex reasoning tasks. These systems typically engage in an extended thinking process before responding to a query, allowing them to generate more thorough, accurate, and well-reasoned solutions. These systems are primarily developed and maintained by industry, with their core techniques not publicly disclosed. In response, an increasing number of studies from the research community aim to explore the technical foundations underlying these powerful reasoning systems. Building on these prior efforts, this paper presents a reproduction report on implementing o1-like reasoning systems. We introduce an "imitate, explore, and self-improve" framework as our primary technical approach to train the reasoning model. In the initial phase, we use distilled long-form thought data to fine-tune the reasoning model, enabling it to invoke a slow-thinking mode. The model is then encouraged to explore challenging problems by generating multiple rollouts, which can result in increasingly more high-quality trajectories that lead to correct answers. Furthermore, the model undergoes self-improvement by iteratively refining its training dataset. To verify the effectiveness of this approach, we conduct extensive experiments on three challenging benchmarks. The experimental results demonstrate that our approach achieves competitive performance compared to industry-level reasoning systems on these benchmarks.

Cognitive textual and visual reasoning tasks, such as puzzles, series, and analogies, demand the ability to quickly reason, decipher, and evaluate patterns both textually and spatially. While LLMs and VLMs, through extensive training on large amounts of human-curated data, have attained a high level of pseudo-human intelligence in some common sense reasoning tasks, they still struggle with more complex reasoning tasks that require cognitive understanding. In this work, we introduce a new dataset, NTSEBench, designed to evaluate the cognitive multi-modal reasoning and problem-solving skills of large models. The dataset comprises 2,728 multiple-choice questions comprising of a total of 4,642 images across 26 categories sampled from the NTSE examination conducted nationwide in India, featuring both visual and textual general aptitude questions that do not rely on rote learning. We establish baselines on the dataset using state-of-the-art LLMs and VLMs. To facilitate a comparison between open source and propriety models, we propose four distinct modeling strategies to handle different modalities (text and images) in the dataset instances.

Advanced models such as OpenAI o1 exhibit impressive problem-solving capabilities through step-by-step reasoning. However, they may still falter on more complex problems, making errors that disrupt their reasoning paths. We attribute this to the expansive solution space, where each step has the risk of diverging into mistakes. To enhance language model reasoning, we introduce a specialized training framework called Reasoning Paths Optimization (RPO), which enables learning to reason and explore from diverse paths. Our approach encourages favorable branches at each reasoning step while penalizing unfavorable ones, enhancing the model's overall problem-solving performance. Reasoning Paths Optimization does not rely on large-scale human-annotated rationales or outputs from closed-source models, making it scalable and data-efficient. We focus on multi-step reasoning tasks, such as math word problems and science-based exam questions. The experiments demonstrate that our framework significantly enhances the reasoning performance of large language models, with up to 3.1% and 4.3% improvement on GSM8K and MMLU (STEM) respectively. Our data and code can be found at https://reasoning-paths.github.io.

Logical reasoning is fundamental for humans yet presents a substantial challenge in the domain of Artificial Intelligence. Initially, researchers used Knowledge Representation and Reasoning (KR) systems that did not scale and required non trivial manual effort. Recently, the emergence of large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated the ability to overcome various limitations of formal Knowledge Representation (KR) systems. Consequently, there is a growing interest in using LLMs for logical reasoning via natural language. This work strives to understand the proficiency of LLMs in logical reasoning by offering a brief review of the latest progress in this area; with a focus on the logical reasoning datasets, tasks, and the methods adopted to utilize LLMs for reasoning. To offer a thorough analysis, we have compiled a benchmark titled LogiGLUE. This includes 24 varied datasets encompassing deductive, abductive, and inductive reasoning. We have standardized these datasets into Seq2Seq tasks to facilitate straightforward training and evaluation for future research. Utilizing LogiGLUE as a foundation, we have trained an instruction fine tuned language model, resulting in LogiT5. We study single task training, multi task training, and a chain of thought knowledge distillation fine tuning technique to assess the performance of model across the different logical reasoning categories. By this comprehensive process, we aim to shed light on the capabilities and potential pathways for enhancing logical reasoning proficiency in LLMs, paving the way for more advanced and nuanced developments in this critical field.

Reasoning models enhance performance by tackling problems in a step-by-step manner, decomposing them into sub-problems and exploring long chains of thought before producing an answer. However, applying extended reasoning to every step introduces substantial redundancy, as sub-problems vary widely in difficulty and complexity: a small number of pivotal steps are genuinely challenging and decisive for the final answer, while many others only involve straightforward revisions or simple computations. Therefore, a natural idea is to endow reasoning models with the ability to adaptively respond to this variation, rather than treating all steps with the same level of elaboration. To this end, we propose MixReasoning, a framework that dynamically adjusts the depth of reasoning within a single response. The resulting chain of thought then becomes a mixture of detailed reasoning on difficult steps and concise inference on simpler ones. Experiments on GSM8K, MATH-500, and AIME show that MixReasoning shortens reasoning length and substantially improves efficiency without compromising accuracy.

Reasoning in mathematical domains remains a significant challenge for relatively small language models (LMs). Many current methods focus on specializing LMs in mathematical reasoning and rely heavily on knowledge distillation from powerful but inefficient large LMs (LLMs). In this work, we explore a new direction that avoids over-reliance on LLM teachers, introducing a multi-view fine-tuning method that efficiently exploits existing mathematical problem datasets with diverse annotation styles. Our approach uniquely considers the various annotation formats as different "views" and leverages them in training the model. By postpending distinct instructions to input questions, models can learn to generate solutions in diverse formats in a flexible manner. Experimental results show that our strategy enables a LLaMA-7B model to outperform prior approaches that utilize knowledge distillation, as well as carefully established baselines. Additionally, the proposed method grants the models promising generalization ability across various views and datasets, and the capability to learn from inaccurate or incomplete noisy data. We hope our multi-view training paradigm could inspire future studies in other machine reasoning domains.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable abilities in scientific reasoning, yet their reasoning capabilities in materials science remain underexplored. To fill this gap, we introduce MatSciBench, a comprehensive college-level benchmark comprising 1,340 problems that span the essential subdisciplines of materials science. MatSciBench features a structured and fine-grained taxonomy that categorizes materials science questions into 6 primary fields and 31 sub-fields, and includes a three-tier difficulty classification based on the reasoning length required to solve each question. MatSciBench provides detailed reference solutions enabling precise error analysis and incorporates multimodal reasoning through visual contexts in numerous questions. Evaluations of leading models reveal that even the highest-performing model, Gemini-2.5-Pro, achieves under 80% accuracy on college-level materials science questions, highlighting the complexity of MatSciBench. Our systematic analysis of different reasoning strategie--basic chain-of-thought, tool augmentation, and self-correction--demonstrates that no single method consistently excels across all scenarios. We further analyze performance by difficulty level, examine trade-offs between efficiency and accuracy, highlight the challenges inherent in multimodal reasoning tasks, analyze failure modes across LLMs and reasoning methods, and evaluate the influence of retrieval-augmented generation. MatSciBench thus establishes a comprehensive and solid benchmark for assessing and driving improvements in the scientific reasoning capabilities of LLMs within the materials science domain.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are highly proficient in language-based tasks. Their language capabilities have positioned them at the forefront of the future AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) race. However, on closer inspection, Valmeekam et al. (2024); Zecevic et al. (2023); Wu et al. (2024) highlight a significant gap between their language proficiency and reasoning abilities. Reasoning in LLMs and Vision Language Models (VLMs) aims to bridge this gap by enabling these models to think and re-evaluate their actions and responses. Reasoning is an essential capability for complex problem-solving and a necessary step toward establishing trust in Artificial Intelligence (AI). This will make AI suitable for deployment in sensitive domains, such as healthcare, banking, law, defense, security etc. In recent times, with the advent of powerful reasoning models like OpenAI O1 and DeepSeek R1, reasoning endowment has become a critical research topic in LLMs. In this paper, we provide a detailed overview and comparison of existing reasoning techniques and present a systematic survey of reasoning-imbued language models. We also study current challenges and present our findings.

This paper investigates the mathematical reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) using 50 newly constructed high-school-level word problems. Unlike prior studies that focus solely on answer correctness, we rigorously analyze both final answers and solution steps to identify reasoning failures. Evaluating eight state-of-the-art models - including Mixtral, Llama, Gemini, GPT-4o, and OpenAI's o1 variants - we find that while newer models (e.g., o3-mini, deepseek-r1) achieve higher accuracy, all models exhibit errors in spatial reasoning, strategic planning, and arithmetic, sometimes producing correct answers through flawed logic. Common failure modes include unwarranted assumptions, over-reliance on numerical patterns, and difficulty translating physical intuition into mathematical steps. Manual analysis reveals that models struggle with problems requiring multi-step deduction or real-world knowledge, despite possessing broad mathematical knowledge. Our results underscore the importance of evaluating reasoning processes, not just answers, and caution against overestimating LLMs' problem-solving proficiency. The study highlights persistent gaps in LLMs' generalization abilities, emphasizing the need for targeted improvements in structured reasoning and constraint handling.

Logic reasoning in natural language has been recognized as an important measure of human intelligence for Large Language Models (LLMs). Popular benchmarks may entangle multiple reasoning skills and thus provide unfaithful evaluations on the logic reasoning skill. Meanwhile, existing logic reasoning benchmarks are limited in language diversity and their distributions are deviated from the distribution of an ideal logic reasoning benchmark, which may lead to biased evaluation results. This paper thereby proposes a new classical logic benchmark DivLogicEval, consisting of natural sentences composed of diverse statements in a counterintuitive way. To ensure a more reliable evaluation, we also introduce a new evaluation metric that mitigates the influence of bias and randomness inherent in LLMs. Through experiments, we demonstrate the extent to which logical reasoning is required to answer the questions in DivLogicEval and compare the performance of different popular LLMs in conducting logical reasoning.

Human beings naturally utilize multiple reasoning modalities to learn and solve logical problems, i.e., different representational formats such as natural language, code, and symbolic logic. In contrast, most existing LLM-based approaches operate with a single reasoning modality during training, typically natural language. Although some methods explored modality selection or augmentation at inference time, the training process remains modality-blind, limiting synergy among modalities. To fill in this gap, we propose Mixture-of-Thought (MoT), a framework that enables LLMs to reason across three complementary modalities: natural language, code, and a newly introduced symbolic modality, truth-table, which systematically enumerates logical cases and partially mitigates key failure modes in natural language reasoning. MoT adopts a two-phase design: (1) self-evolving MoT training, which jointly learns from filtered, self-generated rationales across modalities; and (2) MoT inference, which fully leverages the synergy of three modalities to produce better predictions. Experiments on logical reasoning benchmarks including FOLIO and ProofWriter demonstrate that our MoT framework consistently and significantly outperforms strong LLM baselines with single-modality chain-of-thought approaches, achieving up to +11.7pp average accuracy gain. Further analyses show that our MoT framework benefits both training and inference stages; that it is particularly effective on harder logical reasoning problems; and that different modalities contribute complementary strengths, with truth-table reasoning helping to overcome key bottlenecks in natural language inference.

The ability to process information from multiple modalities and to reason through it step-by-step remains a critical challenge in advancing artificial intelligence. However, existing reasoning benchmarks focus on text-only reasoning, or employ multimodal questions that can be answered by directly retrieving information from a non-text modality. Thus, complex reasoning remains poorly understood in multimodal domains. Here, we present MARBLE, a challenging multimodal reasoning benchmark that is designed to scrutinize multimodal language models (MLLMs) in their ability to carefully reason step-by-step through complex multimodal problems and environments. MARBLE is composed of two highly challenging tasks, M-Portal and M-Cube, that require the crafting and understanding of multistep plans under spatial, visual, and physical constraints. We find that current MLLMs perform poorly on MARBLE -- all the 12 advanced models obtain near-random performance on M-Portal and 0% accuracy on M-Cube. Only in simplified subtasks some models outperform the random baseline, indicating that complex reasoning is still a challenge for existing MLLMs. Moreover, we show that perception remains a bottleneck, where MLLMs occasionally fail to extract information from the visual inputs. By shedding a light on the limitations of MLLMs, we hope that MARBLE will spur the development of the next generation of models with the ability to reason and plan across many, multimodal reasoning steps.

Remarkable progress has been made on automated reasoning with natural text, by using Language Models (LMs) and methods such as Chain-of-Thought and Selection-Inference. These techniques search for proofs in the forward direction from axioms to the conclusion, which suffers from a combinatorial explosion of the search space, and thus high failure rates for problems requiring longer chains of reasoning. The classical automated reasoning literature has shown that reasoning in the backward direction (i.e. from the intended conclusion to supporting axioms) is significantly more efficient at proof-finding. Importing this intuition into the LM setting, we develop a Backward Chaining algorithm, called LAMBADA, that decomposes reasoning into four sub-modules. These sub-modules are simply implemented by few-shot prompted LM inference. We show that LAMBADA achieves sizable accuracy boosts over state-of-the-art forward reasoning methods on challenging logical reasoning datasets, particularly when deep and accurate proof chains are required.

A recent approach to neurosymbolic reasoning is to explicitly combine the strengths of large language models (LLMs) and symbolic solvers to tackle complex reasoning tasks. However, current approaches face significant limitations, including poor generalizability due to task-specific prompts, inefficiencies caused by the lack of separation between knowledge and queries, and restricted inferential capabilities. These shortcomings hinder their scalability and applicability across diverse domains. In this paper, we introduce VERUS-LM, a novel framework designed to address these challenges. VERUS-LM employs a generic prompting mechanism, clearly separates domain knowledge from queries, and supports a wide range of different logical reasoning tasks. This framework enhances adaptability, reduces computational cost, and allows for richer forms of reasoning, such as optimization and constraint satisfaction. We show that our approach succeeds in diverse reasoning on a novel dataset, markedly outperforming LLMs. Additionally, our system achieves competitive results on common reasoning benchmarks when compared to other state-of-the-art approaches, and significantly surpasses them on the difficult AR-LSAT dataset. By pushing the boundaries of hybrid reasoning, VERUS-LM represents a significant step towards more versatile neurosymbolic AI systems

For centuries, researchers have sought out ways to connect disparate areas of knowledge. While early scholars (Galileo, da Vinci, etc.) were experts across fields, specialization has taken hold later. With the advent of Artificial Intelligence, we can now explore relationships across areas (e.g., mechanics-biology) or disparate domains (e.g., failure mechanics-art). To achieve this, we use a fine-tuned Large Language Model (LLM), here for a subset of knowledge in multiscale materials failure. The approach includes the use of a general-purpose LLM to distill question-answer pairs from raw sources followed by LLM fine-tuning. The resulting MechGPT LLM foundation model is used in a series of computational experiments to explore its capacity for knowledge retrieval, various language tasks, hypothesis generation, and connecting knowledge across disparate areas. While the model has some ability to recall knowledge from training, we find that LLMs are particularly useful to extract structural insights through Ontological Knowledge Graphs. These interpretable graph structures provide explanatory insights, frameworks for new research questions, and visual representations of knowledge that also can be used in retrieval-augmented generation. Three versions of MechGPT are discussed, featuring different sizes from 13 billion to 70 billion parameters, and reaching context lengths of more than 10,000 tokens. This provides ample capacity for sophisticated retrieval augmented strategies, as well as agent-based modeling where multiple LLMs interact collaboratively and/or adversarially, the incorporation of new data from the literature or web searches, as well as multimodality.

This study focuses on improving the performance of lightweight Large Language Models (LLMs) in mathematical reasoning tasks. We introduce a novel method for measuring mathematical logic similarity and design an automatic screening mechanism to construct a set of reference problems that integrate both semantic and logical similarity. By employing carefully crafted positive and negative example prompts, we guide the model towards adopting sound reasoning logic. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first attempt to utilize retrieval-enhanced generation for mathematical problem-solving. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves a 15.8% improvement over the Chain of Thought approach on the SVAMP dataset and a 21.5 % improvement on the GSM8K dataset. Further application of this method to a large-scale model with 175 billion parameters yields performance comparable to the best results on both aforementioned datasets. Finally, we conduct an analysis of errors during the reasoning process, providing valuable insights and directions for future research on reasoning tasks using large language models.

Generative commonsense reasoning (GCR) in natural language is to reason about the commonsense while generating coherent text. Recent years have seen a surge of interest in improving the generation quality of commonsense reasoning tasks. Nevertheless, these approaches have seldom investigated diversity in the GCR tasks, which aims to generate alternative explanations for a real-world situation or predict all possible outcomes. Diversifying GCR is challenging as it expects to generate multiple outputs that are not only semantically different but also grounded in commonsense knowledge. In this paper, we propose MoKGE, a novel method that diversifies the generative reasoning by a mixture of expert (MoE) strategy on commonsense knowledge graphs (KG). A set of knowledge experts seek diverse reasoning on KG to encourage various generation outputs. Empirical experiments demonstrated that MoKGE can significantly improve the diversity while achieving on par performance on accuracy on two GCR benchmarks, based on both automatic and human evaluations.

Mathematical reasoning serves as a cornerstone for assessing the fundamental cognitive capabilities of human intelligence. In recent times, there has been a notable surge in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs) geared towards the automated resolution of mathematical problems. However, the landscape of mathematical problem types is vast and varied, with LLM-oriented techniques undergoing evaluation across diverse datasets and settings. This diversity makes it challenging to discern the true advancements and obstacles within this burgeoning field. This survey endeavors to address four pivotal dimensions: i) a comprehensive exploration of the various mathematical problems and their corresponding datasets that have been investigated; ii) an examination of the spectrum of LLM-oriented techniques that have been proposed for mathematical problem-solving; iii) an overview of factors and concerns affecting LLMs in solving math; and iv) an elucidation of the persisting challenges within this domain. To the best of our knowledge, this survey stands as one of the first extensive examinations of the landscape of LLMs in the realm of mathematics, providing a holistic perspective on the current state, accomplishments, and future challenges in this rapidly evolving field.

Mathematical reasoning, a core ability of human intelligence, presents unique challenges for machines in abstract thinking and logical reasoning. Recent large pre-trained language models such as GPT-3 have achieved remarkable progress on mathematical reasoning tasks written in text form, such as math word problems (MWP). However, it is unknown if the models can handle more complex problems that involve math reasoning over heterogeneous information, such as tabular data. To fill the gap, we present Tabular Math Word Problems (TabMWP), a new dataset containing 38,431 open-domain grade-level problems that require mathematical reasoning on both textual and tabular data. Each question in TabMWP is aligned with a tabular context, which is presented as an image, semi-structured text, and a structured table. There are two types of questions: free-text and multi-choice, and each problem is annotated with gold solutions to reveal the multi-step reasoning process. We evaluate different pre-trained models on TabMWP, including the GPT-3 model in a few-shot setting. As earlier studies suggest, since few-shot GPT-3 relies on the selection of in-context examples, its performance is unstable and can degrade to near chance. The unstable issue is more severe when handling complex problems like TabMWP. To mitigate this, we further propose a novel approach, PromptPG, which utilizes policy gradient to learn to select in-context examples from a small amount of training data and then constructs the corresponding prompt for the test example. Experimental results show that our method outperforms the best baseline by 5.31% on the accuracy metric and reduces the prediction variance significantly compared to random selection, which verifies its effectiveness in selecting in-context examples.

Biomedical knowledge is uniquely complex and structured, requiring distinct reasoning strategies compared to other scientific disciplines like physics or chemistry. Biomedical scientists do not rely on a single approach to reasoning; instead, they use various strategies, including rule-based, prototype-based, and case-based reasoning. This diversity calls for flexible approaches that accommodate multiple reasoning strategies while leveraging in-domain knowledge. We introduce KGARevion, a knowledge graph (KG) based agent designed to address the complexity of knowledge-intensive medical queries. Upon receiving a query, KGARevion generates relevant triplets by using the knowledge base of the LLM. These triplets are then verified against a grounded KG to filter out erroneous information and ensure that only accurate, relevant data contribute to the final answer. Unlike RAG-based models, this multi-step process ensures robustness in reasoning while adapting to different models of medical reasoning. Evaluations on four gold-standard medical QA datasets show that KGARevion improves accuracy by over 5.2%, outperforming 15 models in handling complex medical questions. To test its capabilities, we curated three new medical QA datasets with varying levels of semantic complexity, where KGARevion achieved a 10.4% improvement in accuracy.

Chain-of-thought reasoning, a cognitive process fundamental to human intelligence, has garnered significant attention in the realm of artificial intelligence and natural language processing. However, there still remains a lack of a comprehensive survey for this arena. To this end, we take the first step and present a thorough survey of this research field carefully and widely. We use X-of-Thought to refer to Chain-of-Thought in a broad sense. In detail, we systematically organize the current research according to the taxonomies of methods, including XoT construction, XoT structure variants, and enhanced XoT. Additionally, we describe XoT with frontier applications, covering planning, tool use, and distillation. Furthermore, we address challenges and discuss some future directions, including faithfulness, multi-modal, and theory. We hope this survey serves as a valuable resource for researchers seeking to innovate within the domain of chain-of-thought reasoning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have made notable progress in mathematical reasoning, yet they often rely on single-paradigm reasoning that limits their effectiveness across diverse tasks. In this paper, we introduce Chain-of-Reasoning (CoR), a novel unified framework that integrates multiple reasoning paradigms--Natural Language Reasoning (NLR), Algorithmic Reasoning (AR), and Symbolic Reasoning (SR)--to enable synergistic collaboration. CoR generates multiple potential answers using different reasoning paradigms and synthesizes them into a coherent final solution. We propose a Progressive Paradigm Training (PPT) strategy that allows models to progressively master these paradigms, culminating in the development of CoR-Math-7B. Experimental results demonstrate that CoR-Math-7B significantly outperforms current SOTA models, achieving up to a 41.0% absolute improvement over GPT-4 in theorem proving tasks and a 7.9% improvement over RL-based methods in arithmetic tasks. These results showcase the enhanced mathematical comprehensive ability of our model, achieving significant performance gains on specific tasks and enabling zero-shot generalization across tasks.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Existing research has predominantly concentrated on isolated reasoning domains such as mathematical problem-solving, coding tasks, or logical reasoning. However, real world reasoning scenarios inherently demand an integrated application of multiple cognitive skills. Despite this, the interplay among these reasoning skills under reinforcement learning remains poorly understood. To bridge this gap, we present a systematic investigation of multi-domain reasoning within the RLVR framework, explicitly focusing on three primary domains: mathematical reasoning, code generation, and logical puzzle solving. We conduct a comprehensive study comprising four key components: (1) Leveraging the GRPO algorithm and the Qwen-2.5-7B model family, our study thoroughly evaluates the models' in-domain improvements and cross-domain generalization capabilities when trained on single-domain datasets. (2) Additionally, we examine the intricate interactions including mutual enhancements and conflicts that emerge during combined cross-domain training. (3) To further understand the influence of SFT on RL, we also analyze and compare performance differences between base and instruct models under identical RL configurations. (4) Furthermore, we delve into critical RL training details, systematically exploring the impacts of curriculum learning strategies, variations in reward design, and language-specific factors. Through extensive experiments, our results offer significant insights into the dynamics governing domain interactions, revealing key factors influencing both specialized and generalizable reasoning performance. These findings provide valuable guidance for optimizing RL methodologies to foster comprehensive, multi-domain reasoning capabilities in LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown increasing capability in problem-solving and decision-making, largely based on the step-by-step chain-of-thought reasoning processes. However, it has been increasingly challenging to evaluate the reasoning capability of LLMs. Concretely, existing outcome-based benchmarks begin to saturate and become less sufficient to monitor the progress. To this end, we present a process-based benchmark MR-BEN that demands a meta reasoning skill, where LMs are asked to locate and analyse potential errors in automatically generated reasoning steps. MR-BEN is a comprehensive benchmark comprising 5,975 questions collected from human experts, covering various subjects such as physics, chemistry, logic, coding, and more. Through our designed metrics for assessing meta-reasoning on this benchmark, we identify interesting limitations and weaknesses of current LLMs (open-source and closed-source models). For example, open-source models are seemingly comparable to GPT-4 on outcome-based benchmarks, but they lag far behind on our benchmark, revealing the underlying reasoning capability gap between them. Our dataset and codes are available on https://randolph-zeng.github.io/Mr-Ben.github.io/.

We evaluate the reasoning abilities of large language models in multilingual settings. We introduce the Multilingual Grade School Math (MGSM) benchmark, by manually translating 250 grade-school math problems from the GSM8K dataset (Cobbe et al., 2021) into ten typologically diverse languages. We find that the ability to solve MGSM problems via chain-of-thought prompting emerges with increasing model scale, and that models have strikingly strong multilingual reasoning abilities, even in underrepresented languages such as Bengali and Swahili. Finally, we show that the multilingual reasoning abilities of language models extend to other tasks such as commonsense reasoning and word-in-context semantic judgment. The MGSM benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/google-research/url-nlp.

The advent of large language models (LLMs) and their adoption by the legal community has given rise to the question: what types of legal reasoning can LLMs perform? To enable greater study of this question, we present LegalBench: a collaboratively constructed legal reasoning benchmark consisting of 162 tasks covering six different types of legal reasoning. LegalBench was built through an interdisciplinary process, in which we collected tasks designed and hand-crafted by legal professionals. Because these subject matter experts took a leading role in construction, tasks either measure legal reasoning capabilities that are practically useful, or measure reasoning skills that lawyers find interesting. To enable cross-disciplinary conversations about LLMs in the law, we additionally show how popular legal frameworks for describing legal reasoning -- which distinguish between its many forms -- correspond to LegalBench tasks, thus giving lawyers and LLM developers a common vocabulary. This paper describes LegalBench, presents an empirical evaluation of 20 open-source and commercial LLMs, and illustrates the types of research explorations LegalBench enables.

Large language models (LLMs) have shown remarkable reasoning capabilities given chain-of-thought prompts (examples with intermediate reasoning steps). Existing benchmarks measure reasoning ability indirectly, by evaluating accuracy on downstream tasks such as mathematical reasoning. However, it is unclear how these models obtain the answers and whether they rely on simple heuristics rather than the generated chain-of-thought. To enable systematic exploration of the reasoning ability of LLMs, we present a new synthetic question-answering dataset called PrOntoQA, where each example is generated from a synthetic world model represented in first-order logic. This allows us to parse the generated chain-of-thought into symbolic proofs for formal analysis. Our analysis on InstructGPT and GPT-3 shows that LLMs are quite capable of making correct individual deduction steps, and so are generally capable of reasoning, even in fictional contexts. However, they have difficulty with proof planning: When multiple valid deduction steps are available, they are not able to systematically explore the different options.

Logical reasoning consistently plays a fundamental and significant role in the domains of knowledge engineering and artificial intelligence. Recently, Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a noteworthy innovation in natural language processing (NLP), exhibiting impressive achievements across various classic NLP tasks. However, the question of whether LLMs can effectively address the task of logical reasoning, which requires gradual cognitive inference similar to human intelligence, remains unanswered. To this end, we aim to bridge this gap and provide comprehensive evaluations in this paper. Firstly, to offer systematic evaluations, we select fifteen typical logical reasoning datasets and organize them into deductive, inductive, abductive and mixed-form reasoning settings. Considering the comprehensiveness of evaluations, we include three representative LLMs (i.e., text-davinci-003, ChatGPT and BARD) and evaluate them on all selected datasets under zero-shot, one-shot and three-shot settings. Secondly, different from previous evaluations relying only on simple metrics (e.g., accuracy), we propose fine-level evaluations from objective and subjective manners, covering both answers and explanations. Additionally, to uncover the logical flaws of LLMs, problematic cases will be attributed to five error types from two dimensions, i.e., evidence selection process and reasoning process. Thirdly, to avoid the influences of knowledge bias and purely focus on benchmarking the logical reasoning capability of LLMs, we propose a new dataset with neutral content. It contains 3,000 samples and covers deductive, inductive and abductive settings. Based on the in-depth evaluations, this paper finally forms a general evaluation scheme of logical reasoning capability from six dimensions. It reflects the pros and cons of LLMs and gives guiding directions for future works.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown superior capability to solve reasoning problems with programs. While being a promising direction, most of such frameworks are trained and evaluated in settings with a prior knowledge of task requirements. However, as LLMs become more capable, it is necessary to assess their reasoning abilities in more realistic scenarios where many real-world problems are open-ended with ambiguous scope, and often require multiple formalisms to solve. To investigate this, we introduce the task of reasoning in the wild, where an LLM is tasked to solve a reasoning problem of unknown type by identifying the subproblems and their corresponding formalisms, and writing a program to solve each subproblem, guided by a tactic. We create a large tactic-guided trajectory dataset containing detailed solutions to a diverse set of reasoning problems, ranging from well-defined single-form reasoning (e.g., math, logic), to ambiguous and hybrid ones (e.g., commonsense, combined math and logic). This allows us to test various aspects of LLMs reasoning at the fine-grained level such as the selection and execution of tactics, and the tendency to take undesired shortcuts. In experiments, we highlight that existing LLMs fail significantly on problems with ambiguous and mixed scope, revealing critical limitations and overfitting issues (e.g. accuracy on GSM8K drops by at least 50\%). We further show the potential of finetuning a local LLM on the tactic-guided trajectories in achieving better performance. Project repo is available at github.com/gblackout/Reason-in-the-Wild

Medical reasoning in large language models (LLMs) aims to emulate clinicians' diagnostic thinking, but current benchmarks such as MedQA-USMLE, MedMCQA, and PubMedQA often mix reasoning with factual recall. We address this by separating 11 biomedical QA benchmarks into reasoning- and knowledge-focused subsets using a PubMedBERT classifier that reaches 81 percent accuracy, comparable to human performance. Our analysis shows that only 32.8 percent of questions require complex reasoning. We evaluate biomedical models (HuatuoGPT-o1, MedReason, m1) and general-domain models (DeepSeek-R1, o4-mini, Qwen3), finding consistent gaps between knowledge and reasoning performance. For example, m1 scores 60.5 on knowledge but only 47.1 on reasoning. In adversarial tests where models are misled with incorrect initial reasoning, biomedical models degrade sharply, while larger or RL-trained general models show more robustness. To address this, we train BioMed-R1 using fine-tuning and reinforcement learning on reasoning-heavy examples. It achieves the strongest performance among similarly sized models. Further gains may come from incorporating clinical case reports and training with adversarial and backtracking scenarios.

The ability to organically reason over and with both text and images is a pillar of human intelligence, yet the ability of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) to perform such multimodal reasoning remains under-explored. Existing benchmarks often emphasize text-dominant reasoning or rely on shallow visual cues, failing to adequately assess integrated visual and textual reasoning. We introduce EMMA (Enhanced MultiModal reAsoning), a benchmark targeting organic multimodal reasoning across mathematics, physics, chemistry, and coding. EMMA tasks demand advanced cross-modal reasoning that cannot be addressed by reasoning independently in each modality, offering an enhanced test suite for MLLMs' reasoning capabilities. Our evaluation of state-of-the-art MLLMs on EMMA reveals significant limitations in handling complex multimodal and multi-step reasoning tasks, even with advanced techniques like Chain-of-Thought prompting and test-time compute scaling underperforming. These findings underscore the need for improved multimodal architectures and training paradigms to close the gap between human and model reasoning in multimodality.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning abilities across specialized domains, motivating research into their application to legal reasoning. However, existing legal benchmarks often conflate factual recall with genuine inference, fragment the reasoning process, and overlook the quality of reasoning. To address these limitations, we introduce MSLR, the first Chinese multi-step legal reasoning dataset grounded in real-world judicial decision making. MSLR adopts the IRAC framework (Issue, Rule, Application, Conclusion) to model structured expert reasoning from official legal documents. In addition, we design a scalable Human-LLM collaborative annotation pipeline that efficiently produces fine-grained step-level reasoning annotations and provides a reusable methodological framework for multi-step reasoning datasets. Evaluation of multiple LLMs on MSLR shows only moderate performance, highlighting the challenges of adapting to complex legal reasoning. Further experiments demonstrate that Self-Initiated Chain-of-Thought prompts generated by models autonomously improve reasoning coherence and quality, outperforming human-designed prompts. MSLR contributes to advancing LLM reasoning and Chain-of-Thought strategies and offers open resources for future research. The dataset and code are available at https://github.com/yuwenhan07/MSLR-Bench and https://law.sjtu.edu.cn/flszyjzx/index.html.

Recent work has shown that language models (LMs) have strong multi-step (i.e., procedural) reasoning capabilities. However, it is unclear whether LMs perform these tasks by cheating with answers memorized from pretraining corpus, or, via a multi-step reasoning mechanism. In this paper, we try to answer this question by exploring a mechanistic interpretation of LMs for multi-step reasoning tasks. Concretely, we hypothesize that the LM implicitly embeds a reasoning tree resembling the correct reasoning process within it. We test this hypothesis by introducing a new probing approach (called MechanisticProbe) that recovers the reasoning tree from the model's attention patterns. We use our probe to analyze two LMs: GPT-2 on a synthetic task (k-th smallest element), and LLaMA on two simple language-based reasoning tasks (ProofWriter & AI2 Reasoning Challenge). We show that MechanisticProbe is able to detect the information of the reasoning tree from the model's attentions for most examples, suggesting that the LM indeed is going through a process of multi-step reasoning within its architecture in many cases.

Despite notable advancements in multimodal reasoning, leading Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) still underperform on vision-centric multimodal reasoning tasks in general scenarios. This shortfall stems from their predominant reliance on logic- and knowledge-based slow thinking strategies, while effective for domains like math and science, fail to integrate visual information effectively during reasoning. Consequently, these models often fail to adequately ground visual cues, resulting in suboptimal performance in tasks that require multiple plausible visual interpretations and inferences. To address this, we present GThinker (General Thinker), a novel reasoning MLLM excelling in multimodal reasoning across general scenarios, mathematics, and science. GThinker introduces Cue-Rethinking, a flexible reasoning pattern that grounds inferences in visual cues and iteratively reinterprets these cues to resolve inconsistencies. Building on this pattern, we further propose a two-stage training pipeline, including pattern-guided cold start and incentive reinforcement learning, designed to enable multimodal reasoning capabilities across domains. Furthermore, to support the training, we construct GThinker-11K, comprising 7K high-quality, iteratively-annotated reasoning paths and 4K curated reinforcement learning samples, filling the data gap toward general multimodal reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that GThinker achieves 81.5% on the challenging comprehensive multimodal reasoning benchmark M^3CoT, surpassing the latest O4-mini model. It also shows an average improvement of 2.1% on general scenario multimodal reasoning benchmarks, while maintaining on-par performance in mathematical reasoning compared to counterpart advanced reasoning models. The code, model, and data will be released soon at https://github.com/jefferyZhan/GThinker.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance in various natural language processing tasks, yet their ability to perform multi-step logical reasoning remains an open challenge. Although Chain-of-Thought prompting has improved logical reasoning by enabling models to generate intermediate steps, it lacks mechanisms to assess the coherence of these logical transitions. In this paper, we propose a novel, lightweight evaluation strategy for logical reasoning that uses query-key alignments inside transformer attention heads. By computing a single forward pass and extracting a "QK-score" from carefully chosen heads, our method reveals latent representations that reliably separate valid from invalid inferences, offering a scalable alternative to traditional ablation-based techniques. We also provide an empirical validation on multiple logical reasoning benchmarks, demonstrating improved robustness of our evaluation method against distractors and increased reasoning depth. The experiments were conducted on a diverse set of models, ranging from 1.5B to 70B parameters.

Scientific reasoning is critical for developing AI scientists and supporting human researchers in advancing the frontiers of natural science discovery. However, the open-source community has primarily focused on mathematics and coding while neglecting the scientific domain, largely due to the absence of open, large-scale, high-quality, verifiable scientific reasoning datasets. To bridge this gap, we first present TextbookReasoning, an open dataset featuring truthful reference answers extracted from 12k university-level scientific textbooks, comprising 650k reasoning questions spanning 7 scientific disciplines. We further introduce MegaScience, a large-scale mixture of high-quality open-source datasets totaling 1.25 million instances, developed through systematic ablation studies that evaluate various data selection methodologies to identify the optimal subset for each publicly available scientific dataset. Meanwhile, we build a comprehensive evaluation system covering diverse subjects and question types across 15 benchmarks, incorporating comprehensive answer extraction strategies to ensure accurate evaluation metrics. Our experiments demonstrate that our datasets achieve superior performance and training efficiency with more concise response lengths compared to existing open-source scientific datasets. Furthermore, we train Llama3.1, Qwen2.5, and Qwen3 series base models on MegaScience, which significantly outperform the corresponding official instruct models in average performance. In addition, MegaScience exhibits greater effectiveness for larger and stronger models, suggesting a scaling benefit for scientific tuning. We release our data curation pipeline, evaluation system, datasets, and seven trained models to the community to advance scientific reasoning research.

In this paper, we present a novel approach, called LogicPro, to enhance Large Language Models (LLMs) complex Logical reasoning through Program Examples. We do this effectively by simply utilizing widely available algorithmic problems and their code solutions. First, we constructed diverse test samples input based on algorithmic questions and code solutions. Then, we designed different complex reasoning questions based on algorithmic problems and test samples. Finally, combining the intermediate variable outputs of the code solutions and the complex reasoning questions, we derived the reasoning process and the final answer. With this approach, we can construct a dataset that is sufficiently difficult (all models are ineffective), diverse (synthesized from 2,360 different algorithmic questions), and scalable (building different test samples and collecting more algorithmic questions). In addition, we obtain a high-quality reasoning process guided by the values of intermediate variables. As a result, our approach achieves significant improvements in multiple models for the BBH^{27}, GSM8K, HellSwag, Logicqa, Reclor, and RTE datasets, outperforming a wide range of existing reasoning datasets.

Reasoning is an essential component of human intelligence as it plays a fundamental role in our ability to think critically, support responsible decisions, and solve challenging problems. Traditionally, AI has addressed reasoning in the context of logic-based representations of knowledge. However, the recent leap forward in natural language processing, with the emergence of language models based on transformers, is hinting at the possibility that these models exhibit reasoning abilities, particularly as they grow in size and are trained on more data. Despite ongoing discussions about what reasoning is in language models, it is still not easy to pin down to what extent these models are actually capable of reasoning. The goal of this workshop is to create a platform for researchers from different disciplines and/or AI perspectives, to explore approaches and techniques with the aim to reconcile reasoning between language models using transformers and using logic-based representations. The specific objectives include analyzing the reasoning abilities of language models measured alongside KR methods, injecting KR-style reasoning abilities into language models (including by neuro-symbolic means), and formalizing the kind of reasoning language models carry out. This exploration aims to uncover how language models can effectively integrate and leverage knowledge and reasoning with it, thus improving their application and utility in areas where precision and reliability are a key requirement.

Many challenging reasoning tasks require not just rapid, intuitive responses, but a more deliberate, multi-step approach. Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) highlights an important shift from the "System 1" way of quick reactions to the "System 2" style of reflection-and-correction problem solving. However, current benchmarks heavily rely on the final-answer accuracy, leaving much of a model's intermediate reasoning steps unexamined. This fails to assess the model's ability to reflect and rectify mistakes within the reasoning process. To bridge this gap, we introduce FINEREASON, a logic-puzzle benchmark for fine-grained evaluation of LLMs' reasoning capabilities. Each puzzle can be decomposed into atomic steps, making it ideal for rigorous validation of intermediate correctness. Building on this, we introduce two tasks: state checking, and state transition, for a comprehensive evaluation of how models assess the current situation and plan the next move. To support broader research, we also provide a puzzle training set aimed at enhancing performance on general mathematical tasks. We show that models trained on our state checking and transition data demonstrate gains in math reasoning by up to 5.1% on GSM8K.

Humans make numerous inferences in text comprehension to understand discourse. This paper aims to understand the commonalities and disparities in the inference judgments between humans and state-of-the-art Large Language Models (LLMs). Leveraging a comprehensively curated entailment verification benchmark, we evaluate both human and LLM performance across various reasoning categories. Our benchmark includes datasets from three categories (NLI, contextual QA, and rationales) that include multi-sentence premises and different knowledge types, thereby evaluating the inference capabilities in complex reasoning instances. Notably, our findings reveal LLMs' superiority in multi-hop reasoning across extended contexts, while humans excel in tasks necessitating simple deductive reasoning. Leveraging these insights, we introduce a fine-tuned Flan-T5 model that outperforms GPT-3.5 and rivals with GPT-4, offering a robust open-source solution for entailment verification. As a practical application, we showcase the efficacy of our finetuned model in enhancing self-consistency in model-generated explanations, resulting in a 6% performance boost on average across three multiple-choice question-answering datasets.

We study a synthetic corpus based approach for language models (LMs) to acquire logical deductive reasoning ability. The previous studies generated deduction examples using specific sets of deduction rules. However, these rules were limited or otherwise arbitrary, limiting the generalizability of acquired reasoning ability. We rethink this and adopt a well-grounded set of deduction rules based on formal logic theory, which can derive any other deduction rules when combined in a multistep way. Then, using the proposed corpora, which we name FLD (Formal Logic Deduction), we first evaluate and analyze the logical reasoning ability of the latest LLMs. Even GPT-4 can solve only half of the problems, suggesting that pure logical reasoning isolated from knowledge is still challenging for the LLMs, and additional training specialized in logical reasoning is indeed essential. We next empirically verify that LMs trained on FLD corpora acquire more generalizable reasoning ability. Furthermore, we identify the aspects of reasoning ability on which deduction corpora can enhance LMs and those on which they cannot, and discuss future directions on each aspect. The released corpora serve both as learning resources and as challenging benchmarks.

Multimodal reasoning is a challenging task that requires models to reason across multiple modalities to answer questions. Existing approaches have made progress by incorporating language and visual modalities into a two-stage reasoning framework, separating rationale generation from answer inference. However, these approaches often fall short due to the inadequate quality of the generated rationales. In this work, we delve into the importance of rationales in model reasoning. We observe that when rationales are completely accurate, the model's accuracy significantly improves, highlighting the need for high-quality rationale generation. Motivated by this, we propose MC-CoT, a self-consistency training strategy that generates multiple rationales and answers, subsequently selecting the most accurate through a voting process. This approach not only enhances the quality of generated rationales but also leads to more accurate and robust answers. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that our approach significantly improves model performance across various benchmarks. Remarkably, we show that even smaller base models, when equipped with our proposed approach, can achieve results comparable to those of larger models, illustrating the potential of our approach in harnessing the power of rationales for improved multimodal reasoning. The code is available at https://github.com/chengtan9907/mc-cot.

Mathematical reasoning has long represented one of the most fundamental and challenging frontiers in artificial intelligence research. In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant advances in this area. This survey examines the development of mathematical reasoning abilities in LLMs through two high-level cognitive phases: comprehension, where models gain mathematical understanding via diverse pretraining strategies, and answer generation, which has progressed from direct prediction to step-by-step Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning. We review methods for enhancing mathematical reasoning, ranging from training-free prompting to fine-tuning approaches such as supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, and discuss recent work on extended CoT and "test-time scaling". Despite notable progress, fundamental challenges remain in terms of capacity, efficiency, and generalization. To address these issues, we highlight promising research directions, including advanced pretraining and knowledge augmentation techniques, formal reasoning frameworks, and meta-generalization through principled learning paradigms. This survey tries to provide some insights for researchers interested in enhancing reasoning capabilities of LLMs and for those seeking to apply these techniques to other domains.

Deductive reasoning plays a pivotal role in the formulation of sound and cohesive arguments. It allows individuals to draw conclusions that logically follow, given the truth value of the information provided. Recent progress in the domain of large language models (LLMs) has showcased their capability in executing deductive reasoning tasks. Nonetheless, a significant portion of research primarily assesses the accuracy of LLMs in solving such tasks, often overlooking a deeper analysis of their reasoning behavior. In this study, we draw upon principles from cognitive psychology to examine inferential strategies employed by LLMs, through a detailed evaluation of their responses to propositional logic problems. Our findings indicate that LLMs display reasoning patterns akin to those observed in humans, including strategies like supposition following or chain construction. Moreover, our research demonstrates that the architecture and scale of the model significantly affect its preferred method of reasoning, with more advanced models tending to adopt strategies more frequently than less sophisticated ones. Importantly, we assert that a model's accuracy, that is the correctness of its final conclusion, does not necessarily reflect the validity of its reasoning process. This distinction underscores the necessity for more nuanced evaluation procedures in the field.

Reasoning is a fundamental capability for solving complex multi-step problems, particularly in visual contexts where sequential step-wise understanding is essential. Existing approaches lack a comprehensive framework for evaluating visual reasoning and do not emphasize step-wise problem-solving. To this end, we propose a comprehensive framework for advancing step-by-step visual reasoning in large language models (LMMs) through three key contributions. First, we introduce a visual reasoning benchmark specifically designed to evaluate multi-step reasoning tasks. The benchmark presents a diverse set of challenges with eight different categories ranging from complex visual perception to scientific reasoning with over 4k reasoning steps in total, enabling robust evaluation of LLMs' abilities to perform accurate and interpretable visual reasoning across multiple steps. Second, we propose a novel metric that assesses visual reasoning quality at the granularity of individual steps, emphasizing both correctness and logical coherence. The proposed metric offers deeper insights into reasoning performance compared to traditional end-task accuracy metrics. Third, we present a new multimodal visual reasoning model, named LlamaV-o1, trained using a multi-step curriculum learning approach, where tasks are progressively organized to facilitate incremental skill acquisition and problem-solving. The proposed LlamaV-o1 is designed for multi-step reasoning and learns step-by-step through a structured training paradigm. Extensive experiments show that our LlamaV-o1 outperforms existing open-source models and performs favorably against close-source proprietary models. Compared to the recent Llava-CoT, our LlamaV-o1 achieves an average score of 67.3 with an absolute gain of 3.8\% across six benchmarks while being 5 times faster during inference scaling. Our benchmark, model, and code are publicly available.

Most existing multi-hop datasets are extractive answer datasets, where the answers to the questions can be extracted directly from the provided context. This often leads models to use heuristics or shortcuts instead of performing true multi-hop reasoning. In this paper, we propose a new multi-hop dataset, MoreHopQA, which shifts from extractive to generative answers. Our dataset is created by utilizing three existing multi-hop datasets: HotpotQA, 2WikiMultihopQA, and MuSiQue. Instead of relying solely on factual reasoning, we enhance the existing multi-hop questions by adding another layer of questioning that involves one, two, or all three of the following types of reasoning: commonsense, arithmetic, and symbolic. Our dataset is created through a semi-automated process, resulting in a dataset with 1,118 samples that have undergone human verification. We then use our dataset to evaluate five different large language models: Mistral 7B, Gemma 7B, Llama 3 (8B and 70B), and GPT-4. We also design various cases to analyze the reasoning steps in the question-answering process. Our results show that models perform well on initial multi-hop questions but struggle with our extended questions, indicating that our dataset is more challenging than previous ones. Our analysis of question decomposition reveals that although models can correctly answer questions, only a portion - 38.7% for GPT-4 and 33.4% for Llama3-70B - achieve perfect reasoning, where all corresponding sub-questions are answered correctly. Evaluation code and data are available at https://github.com/Alab-NII/morehopqa

Large language models (LLMs) are capable of solving a wide range of tasks, yet they have struggled with reasoning. To address this, we propose Additional Logic Training (ALT), which aims to enhance LLMs' reasoning capabilities by program-generated logical reasoning samples. We first establish principles for designing high-quality samples by integrating symbolic logic theory and previous empirical insights. Then, based on these principles, we construct a synthetic corpus named Formal Logic Deduction Diverse (FLD^{times 2}), comprising numerous samples of multi-step deduction with unknown facts, diverse reasoning rules, diverse linguistic expressions, and challenging distractors. Finally, we empirically show that ALT on FLD^{times2} substantially enhances the reasoning capabilities of state-of-the-art LLMs, including LLaMA-3.1-70B. Improvements include gains of up to 30 points on logical reasoning benchmarks, up to 10 points on math and coding benchmarks, and 5 points on the benchmark suite BBH.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive chain-of-thought reasoning capabilities, with reinforcement learning (RL) playing a crucial role in this progress. While "aha moment" patterns--where models exhibit self-correction through reflection--are often attributed to emergent properties from RL, we first demonstrate that these patterns exist in multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) prior to RL training but may not necessarily correlate with improved reasoning performance. Building on these insights, we present a comprehensive study on enhancing multimodal reasoning through a two-stage approach: (1) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a cold start with structured chain-of-thought reasoning patterns, followed by (2) reinforcement learning via GRPO to further refine these capabilities. Our extensive experiments show that this combined approach consistently outperforms both SFT-only and RL-only methods across challenging multimodal reasoning benchmarks. The resulting models achieve state-of-the-art performance among open-source MLLMs at both 3B and 7B scales, with our 7B model showing substantial improvements over base models (e.g., 66.3 %rightarrow73.4 % on MathVista, 62.9 %rightarrow70.4 % on We-Math) and our 3B model achieving performance competitive with several 7B models. Overall, this work provides practical guidance for building advanced multimodal reasoning models. Our code is available at https://github.com/waltonfuture/RL-with-Cold-Start.

Mathematical reasoning---a core ability within human intelligence---presents some unique challenges as a domain: we do not come to understand and solve mathematical problems primarily on the back of experience and evidence, but on the basis of inferring, learning, and exploiting laws, axioms, and symbol manipulation rules. In this paper, we present a new challenge for the evaluation (and eventually the design) of neural architectures and similar system, developing a task suite of mathematics problems involving sequential questions and answers in a free-form textual input/output format. The structured nature of the mathematics domain, covering arithmetic, algebra, probability and calculus, enables the construction of training and test splits designed to clearly illuminate the capabilities and failure-modes of different architectures, as well as evaluate their ability to compose and relate knowledge and learned processes. Having described the data generation process and its potential future expansions, we conduct a comprehensive analysis of models from two broad classes of the most powerful sequence-to-sequence architectures and find notable differences in their ability to resolve mathematical problems and generalize their knowledge.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in many natural language tasks but still struggle with complex, multi-step reasoning, particularly across diverse disciplines. Existing reasoning datasets often lack disciplinary breadth, reasoning depth, and diversity, and lack guiding principles for question synthesis. We propose DESIGNER: a DESIGN-logic-guidEd Reasoning data synthesis pipeline that leverages naturally available, extensive raw documents (e.g., book corpus and web corpus) to generate multidisciplinary challenging questions. We introduce the concept of "design logic" and instruct LLMs to mimic human educators' question-creation process, enabling automated synthesis of large-scale, high-difficulty questions. We use LLMs to reverse-engineer and abstract over 120,000 design logics from existing questions across various disciplines. By matching these design logics with source documents, we are able to create reasoning questions that far surpass the difficulty and diversity of existing datasets. Using this pipeline, we synthesized two large-scale reasoning datasets that span 75 disciplines: DLR-Book (3.04 million questions from the book corpus) and DLR-Web (1.66 million questions from the web corpus). Data analysis indicates that the questions synthesized by our method exhibit greater difficulty and diversity compared to those in the baseline datasets. We validate our synthesized data through supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on the Qwen3 and Llama3 model families. Our data substantially enhances their multidisciplinary reasoning capabilities, outperforming existing datasets. Notably, after SFT on our datasets, the base versions of these models even surpass their official instruction-tuned counterparts.

This work introduces Symbolic-Aided Chain-of-Thought (CoT), an improved approach to standard CoT, for logical reasoning in large language models (LLMs). The key idea is to integrate lightweight symbolic representations into few-shot prompts, structuring the inference steps with a consistent strategy to make reasoning patterns more explicit within a non-iterative reasoning process. By incorporating these symbolic structures, our method preserves the generalizability of standard prompting techniques while enhancing the transparency, interpretability, and analyzability of LLM logical reasoning. Extensive experiments on four well-known logical reasoning benchmarks -- ProofWriter, FOLIO, ProntoQA, and LogicalDeduction, which cover diverse reasoning scenarios -- demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, particularly in complex reasoning tasks that require navigating multiple constraints or rules. Notably, Symbolic-Aided CoT consistently improves LLMs' reasoning capabilities across various model sizes and significantly outperforms conventional CoT on three out of four datasets, ProofWriter, ProntoQA, and LogicalDeduction.

Language has long been conceived as an essential tool for human reasoning. The breakthrough of Large Language Models (LLMs) has sparked significant research interest in leveraging these models to tackle complex reasoning tasks. Researchers have moved beyond simple autoregressive token generation by introducing the concept of "thought" -- a sequence of tokens representing intermediate steps in the reasoning process. This innovative paradigm enables LLMs' to mimic complex human reasoning processes, such as tree search and reflective thinking. Recently, an emerging trend of learning to reason has applied reinforcement learning (RL) to train LLMs to master reasoning processes. This approach enables the automatic generation of high-quality reasoning trajectories through trial-and-error search algorithms, significantly expanding LLMs' reasoning capacity by providing substantially more training data. Furthermore, recent studies demonstrate that encouraging LLMs to "think" with more tokens during test-time inference can further significantly boost reasoning accuracy. Therefore, the train-time and test-time scaling combined to show a new research frontier -- a path toward Large Reasoning Model. The introduction of OpenAI's o1 series marks a significant milestone in this research direction. In this survey, we present a comprehensive review of recent progress in LLM reasoning. We begin by introducing the foundational background of LLMs and then explore the key technical components driving the development of large reasoning models, with a focus on automated data construction, learning-to-reason techniques, and test-time scaling. We also analyze popular open-source projects at building large reasoning models, and conclude with open challenges and future research directions.

Large language models (LLMs) have gained enormous attention from both academia and industry, due to their exceptional ability in language generation and extremely powerful generalization. However, current LLMs still output unreliable content in practical reasoning tasks due to their inherent issues (e.g., hallucination). To better disentangle this problem, in this paper, we conduct an in-depth investigation to systematically explore the capability of LLMs in logical reasoning. More in detail, we first investigate the deficiency of LLMs in logical reasoning on different tasks, including event relation extraction and deductive reasoning. Our study demonstrates that LLMs are not good reasoners in solving tasks with rigorous reasoning and will produce counterfactual answers, which require us to iteratively refine. Therefore, we comprehensively explore different strategies to endow LLMs with logical reasoning ability, and thus enable them to generate more logically consistent answers across different scenarios. Based on our approach, we also contribute a synthesized dataset (LLM-LR) involving multi-hop reasoning for evaluation and pre-training. Extensive quantitative and qualitative analyses on different tasks also validate the effectiveness and necessity of teaching LLMs with logic and provide insights for solving practical tasks with LLMs in future work.

Analytical reasoning is an essential and challenging task that requires a system to analyze a scenario involving a set of particular circumstances and perform reasoning over it to make conclusions. In this paper, we study the challenge of analytical reasoning of text and introduce a new dataset consisting of questions from the Law School Admission Test from 1991 to 2016. We analyze what knowledge understanding and reasoning abilities are required to do well on this task. Furthermore, to address this reasoning challenge, we design two different baselines: (1) a Transformer-based method which leverages the state-of-the-art pre-trained language models and (2) Analytical Reasoning Machine (ARM), a logical-level reasoning framework extracting symbolic knowledge (e.g, participants, facts, logical functions) to deduce legitimate solutions. In our experiments, we find that the Transformer-based models struggle to solve this task as their performance is close to random guess and ARM achieves better performance by leveraging symbolic knowledge and interpretable reasoning steps. Results show that both methods still lag far behind human performance, which leave further space for future research.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) are increasingly prominent in the field of artificial intelligence. These models not only excel in traditional vision-language tasks but also demonstrate impressive performance in contemporary multi-modal benchmarks. Although many of these benchmarks attempt to holistically evaluate MLLMs, they typically concentrate on basic reasoning tasks, often yielding only simple yes/no or multi-choice responses. These methods naturally lead to confusion and difficulties in conclusively determining the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs. To mitigate this issue, we manually curate a benchmark dataset specifically designed for MLLMs, with a focus on complex reasoning tasks. Our benchmark comprises three key reasoning categories: deductive, abductive, and analogical reasoning. The queries in our dataset are intentionally constructed to engage the reasoning capabilities of MLLMs in the process of generating answers. For a fair comparison across various MLLMs, we incorporate intermediate reasoning steps into our evaluation criteria. In instances where an MLLM is unable to produce a definitive answer, its reasoning ability is evaluated by requesting intermediate reasoning steps. If these steps align with our manual annotations, appropriate scores are assigned. This evaluation scheme resembles methods commonly used in human assessments, such as exams or assignments, and represents what we consider a more effective assessment technique compared with existing benchmarks. We evaluate a selection of representative MLLMs using this rigorously developed open-ended multi-step elaborate reasoning benchmark, designed to challenge and accurately measure their reasoning capabilities. The code and data will be released at https://core-mm.github.io/

Human cognition exhibits systematic compositionality, the algebraic ability to generate infinite novel combinations from finite learned components, which is the key to understanding and reasoning about complex logic. In this work, we investigate the compositionality of large language models (LLMs) in mathematical reasoning. Specifically, we construct a new dataset MathTrap by introducing carefully designed logical traps into the problem descriptions of MATH and GSM8K. Since problems with logical flaws are quite rare in the real world, these represent "unseen" cases to LLMs. Solving these requires the models to systematically compose (1) the mathematical knowledge involved in the original problems with (2) knowledge related to the introduced traps. Our experiments show that while LLMs possess both components of requisite knowledge, they do not spontaneously combine them to handle these novel cases. We explore several methods to mitigate this deficiency, such as natural language prompts, few-shot demonstrations, and fine-tuning. Additionally, we test the recently released OpenAI o1 model and find that human-like `slow thinking' helps improve the compositionality of LLMs. Overall, systematic compositionality remains an open challenge for large language models.

Studies have underscored how, regardless of the recent breakthrough and swift advances in AI research, even state-of-the-art Large Language models (LLMs) continue to struggle when performing logical and mathematical reasoning. The results seem to suggest that LLMs still work as (highly advanced) data pattern identifiers, scoring poorly when attempting to generalise and solve reasoning problems the models have never previously seen or that are not close to samples presented in their training data. To address this compelling concern, this paper makes use of the notion of critical questions from the literature on argumentation theory, focusing in particular on Toulmin's model of argumentation. We show that employing these critical questions can improve the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. By probing the rationale behind the models' reasoning process, the LLM can assess whether some logical mistake is occurring and correct it before providing the final reply to the user prompt. The underlying idea is drawn from the gold standard of any valid argumentative procedure: the conclusion is valid if it is entailed by accepted premises. Or, to paraphrase such Aristotelian principle in a real-world approximation, characterised by incomplete information and presumptive logic, the conclusion is valid if not proved otherwise. This approach successfully steers the models' output through a reasoning pipeline, resulting in better performance against the baseline and its Chain-of-Thought (CoT) implementation. To this end, an extensive evaluation of the proposed approach on the MT-Bench Reasoning and Math tasks across a range of LLMs is provided.

Multi-modal Large Language Models (MLLMs) exhibit impressive problem-solving abilities in various domains, but their visual comprehension and abstract reasoning skills remain under-evaluated. To this end, we present PolyMATH, a challenging benchmark aimed at evaluating the general cognitive reasoning abilities of MLLMs. PolyMATH comprises 5,000 manually collected high-quality images of cognitive textual and visual challenges across 10 distinct categories, including pattern recognition, spatial reasoning, and relative reasoning. We conducted a comprehensive, and quantitative evaluation of 15 MLLMs using four diverse prompting strategies, including Chain-of-Thought and Step-Back. The best scores achieved on PolyMATH are ~41%, ~36%, and ~27%, obtained by Claude-3.5 Sonnet, GPT-4o and Gemini-1.5 Pro respectively - highlighting the logical and visual complexity of these questions. A further fine-grained error analysis reveals that these models struggle to understand spatial relations and perform drawn-out, high-level reasoning. This is further strengthened by our ablation study estimating MLLM performance when given textual descriptions in place of diagrams. As evidenced by ~4% improvement over textual descriptions as opposed to actual images, we discover that models do not truly comprehend visual diagrams and the spatial information therein, and are thus prone to logical errors. Finally, we evaluate the OpenAI o1 models and find that their performance only matches the human baseline, highlighting the difficulty of the benchmark. The results on PolyMATH highlight the room for improvement in multi-modal reasoning and provide unique insights to guide the development of future MLLMs.

In this work, we study whether multilingual language models (MultiLMs) can transfer logical reasoning abilities to other languages when they are fine-tuned for reasoning in a different language. We evaluate the cross-lingual reasoning abilities of MultiLMs in two schemes: (1) where the language of the context and the question remain the same in the new languages that are tested (i.e., the reasoning is still monolingual, but the model must transfer the learned reasoning ability across languages), and (2) where the language of the context and the question is different (which we term code-switched reasoning). On two logical reasoning datasets, RuleTaker and LeapOfThought, we demonstrate that although MultiLMs can transfer reasoning ability across languages in a monolingual setting, they struggle to transfer reasoning abilities in a code-switched setting. Following this observation, we propose a novel attention mechanism that uses a dedicated set of parameters to encourage cross-lingual attention in code-switched sequences, which improves the reasoning performance by up to 14% and 4% on the RuleTaker and LeapOfThought datasets, respectively.

Predominant LLMs focus on high-resource languages while leaving low-resource languages, particularly those in Southeast Asia (SEA), underrepresented. In addition, those models are general-purpose and pay limited attention to the e-commerce domain. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Compass-v2, a lightweight Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) model specifically designed for Southeast Asian languages and e-commerce applications. To balance model performance and inference cost, the model is designed with 30B total parameters and 5B active parameters, incorporating both fine-grained and shared expert modules. To enhance multilingual performance, we curated and constructed a high-quality, industry-leading SEA dataset, to the best of our knowledge. To boost performance in the e-commerce domain, we built a dataset comprising hundreds of billions of tokens, sourced through external data mining and internal platform collection. Besides, we pioneered a hybrid reasoning model that supports both fast thinking and deep thinking within a unified framework to enhance the reasoning capabilities, diverging from the conventional industry practice of deploying two separate models. Through extensive experimental evaluations, our model demonstrates state-of-the-art SEA multilingual and e-commerce performance among sub-30B models, while maintaining significantly lower inference cost.

We propose LogicVista, an evaluation benchmark that assesses the integrated logical reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in Visual contexts. Recent advancements in MLLMs have demonstrated various fascinating abilities, from crafting poetry based on an image to performing mathematical reasoning. However, there is still a lack of systematic evaluation of MLLMs' proficiency in logical reasoning tasks, which are essential for activities like navigation and puzzle-solving. Thus we evaluate general logical cognition abilities across 5 logical reasoning tasks encompassing 9 different capabilities, using a sample of 448 multiple-choice questions. Each question is annotated with the correct answer and the human-written reasoning behind the selection, enabling both open-ended and multiple-choice evaluation. A total of 8 MLLMs are comprehensively evaluated using LogicVista. Code and Data Available at https://github.com/Yijia-Xiao/LogicVista.