Daily Papers

Multimodal embeddings are widely used in downstream tasks such as multimodal retrieval, enabling alignment of interleaved modalities in a shared representation space. While recent studies show that Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) can serve as strong embedding extractors, existing approaches treat embedding extraction as a direct encoding step, overlooking the fact that MLLMs possess the generative capability for reasoning that could be leveraged to enhance representation quality. In this work, we explore how to explicitly incorporate reasoning into the embedding process. To this end, we propose Reasoning Guided Embeddings (RGE), which preserves the generative rationale process of MLLMs and couples it with contrastive training. Our method first enables the model to perform structured rationale generation conditioned on the instruction, and then extracts representations after reasoning has unfolded. This simple design enhances the context-conditional inference signals within the embedding, leading to improved multimodal representation quality. Experiments on the MMEB benchmark show that reasoning-guided conditioning improves multimodal retrieval performance by 4.9% over the non-reasoning baseline, confirming that explicit reasoning can effectively enhance embedding quality.

Despite impressive advancements in Visual-Language Models (VLMs) for multi-modal tasks, their reliance on RGB inputs limits precise spatial understanding. Existing methods for integrating spatial cues, such as point clouds or depth, either require specialized sensors or fail to effectively exploit depth information for higher-order reasoning. To this end, we propose a novel Spatial Sense and Reasoning method, dubbed SSR, a novel framework that transforms raw depth data into structured, interpretable textual rationales. These textual rationales serve as meaningful intermediate representations to significantly enhance spatial reasoning capabilities. Additionally, we leverage knowledge distillation to compress the generated rationales into compact latent embeddings, which facilitate resource-efficient and plug-and-play integration into existing VLMs without retraining. To enable comprehensive evaluation, we introduce a new dataset named SSR-CoT, a million-scale visual-language reasoning dataset enriched with intermediate spatial reasoning annotations, and present SSRBench, a comprehensive multi-task benchmark. Extensive experiments on multiple benchmarks demonstrate SSR substantially improves depth utilization and enhances spatial reasoning, thereby advancing VLMs toward more human-like multi-modal understanding. Our project page is at https://yliu-cs.github.io/SSR.

Open-vocabulary 3D visual grounding and reasoning aim to localize objects in a scene based on implicit language descriptions, even when they are occluded. This ability is crucial for tasks such as vision-language navigation and autonomous robotics. However, current methods struggle because they rely heavily on fine-tuning with 3D annotations and mask proposals, which limits their ability to handle diverse semantics and common knowledge required for effective reasoning. In this work, we propose ReasonGrounder, an LVLM-guided framework that uses hierarchical 3D feature Gaussian fields for adaptive grouping based on physical scale, enabling open-vocabulary 3D grounding and reasoning. ReasonGrounder interprets implicit instructions using large vision-language models (LVLM) and localizes occluded objects through 3D Gaussian splatting. By incorporating 2D segmentation masks from the SAM and multi-view CLIP embeddings, ReasonGrounder selects Gaussian groups based on object scale, enabling accurate localization through both explicit and implicit language understanding, even in novel, occluded views. We also contribute ReasoningGD, a new dataset containing over 10K scenes and 2 million annotations for evaluating open-vocabulary 3D grounding and amodal perception under occlusion. Experiments show that ReasonGrounder significantly improves 3D grounding accuracy in real-world scenarios.

Accurate road topology reasoning is critical for autonomous driving, as it requires both perceiving road elements and understanding how lanes connect to each other (L2L) and to traffic elements (L2T). Existing methods often focus on either perception or L2L reasoning, leaving L2T underexplored and fall short of jointly optimizing perception and reasoning. Moreover, although topology prediction inherently involves relations, relational modeling itself is seldom incorporated into feature extraction or supervision. As humans naturally leverage contextual relationships to recognize road element and infer their connectivity, we posit that relational modeling can likewise benefit both perception and reasoning, and that these two tasks should be mutually enhancing. To this end, we propose RelTopo, a multi-level relational modeling approach that systematically integrates relational cues across three levels: 1) perception-level: a relation-aware lane detector with geometry-biased self-attention and curve-guided cross-attention enriches lane representations; 2) reasoning-level: relation-enhanced topology heads, including a geometry-enhanced L2L head and a cross-view L2T head, enhance topology inference via relational cues; and 3) supervision-level: a contrastive InfoNCE strategy regularizes relational embeddings. This design enables perception and reasoning to be optimized jointly. Extensive experiments on OpenLane-V2 demonstrate that RelTopo significantly improves both detection and topology reasoning, with gains of +3.1 in DET_l, +5.3 in TOP_{ll}, +4.9 in TOP_{lt}, and +4.4 overall in OLS, setting a new state-of-the-art. Code will be released.

Long video understanding remains challenging due to its complex, diverse, and temporally scattered content. Although video large language models (Video-LLMs) can process videos lasting tens of minutes, applying them to truly long sequences is computationally prohibitive and often leads to unfocused or inconsistent reasoning. A promising solution is to select only the most informative frames, yet existing approaches typically ignore temporal dependencies or rely on unimodal evidence, limiting their ability to provide complete and query-relevant context. We propose a Semantic-Visual Consensus Evidence Selection (SeViCES) framework for effective and reliable long video understanding. SeViCES is training-free and model-agnostic, and introduces two key components. The Semantic-Visual Consensus Frame Selection (SVCFS) module selects frames through (1) a temporal-aware semantic branch that leverages LLM reasoning over captions, and (2) a cluster-guided visual branch that aligns embeddings with semantic scores via mutual information. The Answer Consensus Refinement (ACR) module further resolves inconsistencies between semantic- and visual-based predictions by fusing evidence and constraining the answer space. Extensive experiments on long video understanding benchmarks show that SeViCES consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in both accuracy and robustness, demonstrating the importance of consensus-driven evidence selection for Video-LLMs.

Recent advances in multimodal large language models (LLMs) have led to significant progress in understanding, generation, and retrieval tasks. However, current solutions often treat these tasks in isolation or require training LLMs from scratch, resulting in high computational costs and limited generalization across modalities. In this work, we present OmniBridge, a unified and modular multimodal framework that supports vision-language understanding, generation, and retrieval within a unified architecture. OmniBridge adopts a language-centric design that reuses pretrained LLMs and introduces a lightweight bidirectional latent alignment module. To address the challenge of task interference, we propose a two-stage decoupled training strategy: supervised fine-tuning and latent space alignment for aligning LLM behavior with multimodal reasoning, and semantic-guided diffusion training to align cross-modal latent spaces via learnable query embeddings. Extensive experiments across a wide range of benchmarks demonstrate that OmniBridge achieves competitive or state-of-the-art performance in all three tasks. Moreover, our results highlight the effectiveness of latent space alignment for unifying multimodal modeling under a shared representation space. Code and models are released at https://github.com/xiao-xt/OmniBridge.

Multi-hop question answering over knowledge graphs remains computationally challenging due to the combinatorial explosion of possible reasoning paths. Recent approaches rely on expensive Large Language Model (LLM) inference for both entity linking and path ranking, limiting their practical deployment. Additionally, LLM-generated answers often lack verifiable grounding in structured knowledge. We present two complementary hybrid algorithms that address both efficiency and verifiability: (1) LLM-Guided Planning that uses a single LLM call to predict relation sequences executed via breadth-first search, achieving near-perfect accuracy (micro-F1 > 0.90) while ensuring all answers are grounded in the knowledge graph, and (2) Embedding-Guided Neural Search that eliminates LLM calls entirely by fusing text and graph embeddings through a lightweight 6.7M-parameter edge scorer, achieving over 100 times speedup with competitive accuracy. Through knowledge distillation, we compress planning capability into a 4B-parameter model that matches large-model performance at zero API cost. Evaluation on MetaQA demonstrates that grounded reasoning consistently outperforms ungrounded generation, with structured planning proving more transferable than direct answer generation. Our results show that verifiable multi-hop reasoning does not require massive models at inference time, but rather the right architectural inductive biases combining symbolic structure with learned representations.

We consider the problem of Recognizing Textual Entailment within an Information Retrieval context, where we must simultaneously determine the relevancy as well as degree of entailment for individual pieces of evidence to determine a yes/no answer to a binary natural language question. We compare several variants of neural networks for sentence embeddings in a setting of decision-making based on evidence of varying relevance. We propose a basic model to integrate evidence for entailment, show that joint training of the sentence embeddings to model relevance and entailment is feasible even with no explicit per-evidence supervision, and show the importance of evaluating strong baselines. We also demonstrate the benefit of carrying over text comprehension model trained on an unrelated task for our small datasets. Our research is motivated primarily by a new open dataset we introduce, consisting of binary questions and news-based evidence snippets. We also apply the proposed relevance-entailment model on a similar task of ranking multiple-choice test answers, evaluating it on a preliminary dataset of school test questions as well as the standard MCTest dataset, where we improve the neural model state-of-art.

In this paper, we introduce ReasonEmbed, a novel text embedding model developed for reasoning-intensive document retrieval. Our work includes three key technical contributions. First, we propose ReMixer, a new data synthesis method that overcomes the triviality problem prevalent in previous synthetic datasets, enabling large-scale production of 82K high-quality training samples. Second, we design Redapter, a self-adaptive learning algorithm that dynamically adjusts training each sample's weight based on its reasoning intensity. This allows the model to effectively capture the complex semantic relationships between queries and documents. Third, we implement ReasonEmbed across multiple backbones of varying sizes, all of which achieve superior performance on reasoning-intensive retrieval tasks. Notably, our ReasonEmbed-Qwen3-8B model offers a record-high nDCG@10 score of 38.1 on the BRIGHT benchmark, which significantly outperforms existing text embedding models. We will fully open-source our created resources in ReasonEmbed to push forward the research advancement in this field.

Semantic textual similartiy (STS) and information retrieval tasks (IR) tasks have been the two major avenues to record the progress of embedding models in the past few years. Under the emerging Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG) paradigm, we envision the need to evaluate next-level language understanding abilities of embedding models, and take a conscious look at the reasoning abilities stored in them. Addressing this, we pose the question: Can retrievers solve reasoning problems? By transforming reasoning tasks into retrieval tasks, we find that without specifically trained for reasoning-level language understanding, current state-of-the-art retriever models may still be far from being competent for playing the role of assisting LLMs, especially in reasoning-intensive tasks. Moreover, albeit trained to be aware of instructions, instruction-aware IR models are often better off without instructions in inference time for reasoning tasks, posing an overlooked retriever-LLM behavioral gap for the research community to align. However, recent decoder-based embedding models show great promise in narrowing the gap, highlighting the pathway for embedding models to achieve reasoning-level language understanding. We also show that, although current off-the-shelf re-ranker models fail on these tasks, injecting reasoning abilities into them through fine-tuning still appears easier than doing so to bi-encoders, and we are able to achieve state-of-the-art performance across all tasks by fine-tuning a reranking model. We release Reasoning as Retrieval Benchmark (RAR-b), a holistic suite of tasks and settings to evaluate the reasoning abilities stored in retriever models. RAR-b is available at https://github.com/gowitheflow-1998/RAR-b.

In modern e-commerce search systems, dense retrieval has become an indispensable component. By computing similarities between query and item (product) embeddings, it efficiently selects candidate products from large-scale repositories. With the breakthroughs in large language models (LLMs), mainstream embedding models have gradually shifted from BERT to LLMs for more accurate text modeling. However, these models still adopt direct-embedding methods, and the semantic accuracy of embeddings remains inadequate. Therefore, contrastive learning is heavily employed to achieve tight semantic alignment between positive pairs. Consequently, such models tend to capture statistical co-occurrence patterns in the training data, biasing them toward shallow lexical and semantic matches. For difficult queries exhibiting notable lexical disparity from target items, the performance degrades significantly. In this work, we propose the Large Reasoning Embedding Model (LREM), which novelly integrates reasoning processes into representation learning. For difficult queries, LREM first conducts reasoning to achieve a deep understanding of the original query, and then produces a reasoning-augmented query embedding for retrieval. This reasoning process effectively bridges the semantic gap between original queries and target items, significantly improving retrieval accuracy. Specifically, we adopt a two-stage training process: the first stage optimizes the LLM on carefully curated Query-CoT-Item triplets with SFT and InfoNCE losses to establish preliminary reasoning and embedding capabilities, and the second stage further refines the reasoning trajectories via reinforcement learning (RL). Extensive offline and online experiments validate the effectiveness of LREM, leading to its deployment on China's largest e-commerce platform since August 2025.

There is a growing interest in Universal Multimodal Embeddings (UME), where models are required to generate task-specific representations. While recent studies show that Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) perform well on such tasks, they treat MLLMs solely as encoders, overlooking their generative capacity. However, such an encoding paradigm becomes less effective as instructions become more complex and require compositional reasoning. Inspired by the proven effectiveness of chain-of-thought reasoning, we propose a general Think-Then-Embed (TTE) framework for UME, composed of a reasoner and an embedder. The reasoner MLLM first generates reasoning traces that explain complex queries, followed by an embedder that produces representations conditioned on both the original query and the intermediate reasoning. This explicit reasoning step enables more nuanced understanding of complex multimodal instructions. Our contributions are threefold. First, by leveraging a powerful MLLM reasoner, we achieve state-of-the-art performance on the MMEB-V2 benchmark, surpassing proprietary models trained on massive in-house datasets. Second, to reduce the dependency on large MLLM reasoners, we finetune a smaller MLLM reasoner using high-quality embedding-centric reasoning traces, achieving the best performance among open-source models with a 7% absolute gain over recently proposed models. Third, we investigate strategies for integrating the reasoner and embedder into a unified model for improved efficiency without sacrificing performance.

Despite their remarkable natural language understanding capabilities, Large Language Models (LLMs) have been underutilized for retrieval tasks. We present Search-R3, a novel framework that addresses this limitation by adapting LLMs to generate search embeddings as a direct output of their reasoning process. Our approach exploits LLMs' chain-of-thought capabilities, allowing them to produce more effective embeddings by reasoning step-by-step through complex semantic analyses. We implement this through three complementary mechanisms. (1) a supervised learning stage enables the model's ability to produce quality embeddings, (2) a reinforcement learning (RL) methodology that optimizes embedding generation alongside reasoning, and (3) a specialized RL environment that efficiently handles evolving embedding representations without requiring complete corpus re-encoding at each training iteration. Our extensive evaluations on diverse benchmarks demonstrate that Search-R3 significantly outperforms prior methods by unifying the reasoning and embedding generation processes. This integrated post-training approach represents a substantial advancement in handling complex knowledge-intensive tasks that require both sophisticated reasoning and effective information retrieval. Project page: https://github.com/ytgui/Search-R3

We propose new static word embeddings optimised for sentence semantic representation. We first extract word embeddings from a pre-trained Sentence Transformer, and improve them with sentence-level principal component analysis, followed by either knowledge distillation or contrastive learning. During inference, we represent sentences by simply averaging word embeddings, which requires little computational cost. We evaluate models on both monolingual and cross-lingual tasks and show that our model substantially outperforms existing static models on sentence semantic tasks, and even rivals a basic Sentence Transformer model (SimCSE) on some data sets. Lastly, we perform a variety of analyses and show that our method successfully removes word embedding components that are irrelevant to sentence semantics, and adjusts the vector norms based on the influence of words on sentence semantics.

We introduce sub-sentence encoder, a contrastively-learned contextual embedding model for fine-grained semantic representation of text. In contrast to the standard practice with sentence embeddings, where the meaning of an entire sequence of text is encoded into a fixed-length vector, the sub-sentence encoder learns to produce distinct contextual embeddings corresponding to different atomic propositions, i.e. atomic units of meaning expressed within a text sequence. The sub-sentence embeddings are contrastively learned to recognize (inferred) semantic equivalence between propositions across different text sequences. Our experiments show the effectiveness of sub-sentence encoders in applications, such as retrieving supporting facts for fine-grained text attribution or recognizing the conditional semantic similarity between texts. In practice, we demonstrate that sub-sentence encoders keep the same level of inference cost and space complexity compared to sentence encoders.

Reasoning on knowledge graphs is a challenging task because it utilizes observed information to predict the missing one. Particularly, answering complex queries based on first-order logic is one of the crucial tasks to verify learning to reason abilities for generalization and composition. Recently, the prevailing method is query embedding which learns the embedding of a set of entities and treats logic operations as set operations and has shown great empirical success. Though there has been much research following the same formulation, many of its claims lack a formal and systematic inspection. In this paper, we rethink this formulation and justify many of the previous claims by characterizing the scope of queries investigated previously and precisely identifying the gap between its formulation and its goal, as well as providing complexity analysis for the currently investigated queries. Moreover, we develop a new dataset containing ten new types of queries with features that have never been considered and therefore can provide a thorough investigation of complex queries. Finally, we propose a new neural-symbolic method, Fuzzy Inference with Truth value (FIT), where we equip the neural link predictors with fuzzy logic theory to support end-to-end learning using complex queries with provable reasoning capability. Empirical results show that our method outperforms previous methods significantly in the new dataset and also surpasses previous methods in the existing dataset at the same time.

Autoregressive language models (LMs) generate one token at a time, yet human reasoning operates over higher-level abstractions - sentences, propositions, and concepts. This contrast raises a central question- Can LMs likewise learn to reason over structured semantic units rather than raw token sequences? In this work, we investigate whether pretrained LMs can be lifted into such abstract reasoning spaces by building on their learned representations. We present a framework that adapts a pretrained token-level LM to operate in sentence space by autoregressively predicting continuous embeddings of next sentences. We explore two embedding paradigms inspired by classical representation learning: 1) semantic embeddings, learned via autoencoding to preserve surface meaning; and 2) contextual embeddings, trained via next-sentence prediction to encode anticipatory structure. We evaluate both under two inference regimes: Discretized, which decodes each predicted embedding into text before re-encoding; and Continuous, which reasons entirely in embedding space for improved efficiency. Across four domains - mathematics, logic, commonsense, and planning - contextual embeddings under continuous inference show competitive performance with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) while reducing inference-time FLOPs on average by half. We also present early signs of scalability and modular adaptation. Finally, to visualize latent trajectories, we introduce SentenceLens, a diagnostic tool that decodes intermediate model states into interpretable sentences. Together, our results indicate that pretrained LMs can effectively transition to abstract, structured reasoning within latent embedding spaces.

Reasoning is a key component of language understanding in Large Language Models. While Chain-of-Thought prompting enhances performance via explicit intermediate steps, it suffers from sufficient token overhead and a fixed reasoning trajectory, preventing step-wise refinement. Recent advances in latent reasoning address these limitations by refining internal reasoning processes directly in the model's latent space, without producing explicit outputs. However, a key challenge remains: how to effectively update reasoning embeddings during post-training to guide the model toward more accurate solutions. To overcome this challenge, we propose a lightweight post-training framework that refines latent reasoning trajectories using two novel strategies: 1) Contrastive reasoning feedback, which compares reasoning embeddings against strong and weak baselines to infer effective update directions via embedding enhancement; 2) Residual embedding refinement, which stabilizes updates by progressively integrating current and historical gradients, enabling fast yet controlled convergence. Extensive experiments and case studies are conducted on five reasoning benchmarks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. Notably, a 5\% accuracy gain on MathQA without additional training.

We consider learning representations of entities and relations in KBs using the neural-embedding approach. We show that most existing models, including NTN (Socher et al., 2013) and TransE (Bordes et al., 2013b), can be generalized under a unified learning framework, where entities are low-dimensional vectors learned from a neural network and relations are bilinear and/or linear mapping functions. Under this framework, we compare a variety of embedding models on the link prediction task. We show that a simple bilinear formulation achieves new state-of-the-art results for the task (achieving a top-10 accuracy of 73.2% vs. 54.7% by TransE on Freebase). Furthermore, we introduce a novel approach that utilizes the learned relation embeddings to mine logical rules such as "BornInCity(a,b) and CityInCountry(b,c) => Nationality(a,c)". We find that embeddings learned from the bilinear objective are particularly good at capturing relational semantics and that the composition of relations is characterized by matrix multiplication. More interestingly, we demonstrate that our embedding-based rule extraction approach successfully outperforms a state-of-the-art confidence-based rule mining approach in mining Horn rules that involve compositional reasoning.

Embedding knowledge graphs (KGs) into continuous vector spaces is a focus of current research. Early works performed this task via simple models developed over KG triples. Recent attempts focused on either designing more complicated triple scoring models, or incorporating extra information beyond triples. This paper, by contrast, investigates the potential of using very simple constraints to improve KG embedding. We examine non-negativity constraints on entity representations and approximate entailment constraints on relation representations. The former help to learn compact and interpretable representations for entities. The latter further encode regularities of logical entailment between relations into their distributed representations. These constraints impose prior beliefs upon the structure of the embedding space, without negative impacts on efficiency or scalability. Evaluation on WordNet, Freebase, and DBpedia shows that our approach is simple yet surprisingly effective, significantly and consistently outperforming competitive baselines. The constraints imposed indeed improve model interpretability, leading to a substantially increased structuring of the embedding space. Code and data are available at https://github.com/iieir-km/ComplEx-NNE_AER.

Motivation: Biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs) are crucial for drug discovery and disease understanding, yet their completion and reasoning are challenging. Knowledge Embedding (KE) methods capture global semantics but struggle with dynamic structural integration, while Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) excel locally but often lack semantic understanding. Even ensemble approaches, including those leveraging language models, often fail to achieve a deep, adaptive, and synergistic co-evolution between semantic comprehension and structural learning. Addressing this critical gap in fostering continuous, reciprocal refinement between these two aspects in complex biomedical KGs is paramount. Results: We introduce BioGraphFusion, a novel framework for deeply synergistic semantic and structural learning. BioGraphFusion establishes a global semantic foundation via tensor decomposition, guiding an LSTM-driven mechanism to dynamically refine relation embeddings during graph propagation. This fosters adaptive interplay between semantic understanding and structural learning, further enhanced by query-guided subgraph construction and a hybrid scoring mechanism. Experiments across three key biomedical tasks demonstrate BioGraphFusion's superior performance over state-of-the-art KE, GNN, and ensemble models. A case study on Cutaneous Malignant Melanoma 1 (CMM1) highlights its ability to unveil biologically meaningful pathways. Availability and Implementation: Source code and all training data are freely available for download at https://github.com/Y-TARL/BioGraphFusion. Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Reinforcement learning has become essential for strengthening the reasoning abilities of large language models, yet current exploration mechanisms remain fundamentally misaligned with how these models actually learn. Entropy bonuses and external semantic comparators encourage surface level variation but offer no guarantee that sampled trajectories differ in the update directions that shape optimization. We propose G2RL, a gradient guided reinforcement learning framework in which exploration is driven not by external heuristics but by the model own first order update geometry. For each response, G2RL constructs a sequence level feature from the model final layer sensitivity, obtainable at negligible cost from a standard forward pass, and measures how each trajectory would reshape the policy by comparing these features within a sampled group. Trajectories that introduce novel gradient directions receive a bounded multiplicative reward scaler, while redundant or off manifold updates are deemphasized, yielding a self referential exploration signal that is naturally aligned with PPO style stability and KL control. Across math and general reasoning benchmarks (MATH500, AMC, AIME24, AIME25, GPQA, MMLUpro) on Qwen3 base 1.7B and 4B models, G2RL consistently improves pass@1, maj@16, and pass@k over entropy based GRPO and external embedding methods. Analyzing the induced geometry, we find that G2RL expands exploration into substantially more orthogonal and often opposing gradient directions while maintaining semantic coherence, revealing that a policy own update space provides a far more faithful and effective basis for guiding exploration in large language model reinforcement learning.

Learning semantically meaningful sentence embeddings is an open problem in natural language processing. In this work, we propose a sentence embedding learning approach that exploits both visual and textual information via a multimodal contrastive objective. Through experiments on a variety of semantic textual similarity tasks, we demonstrate that our approach consistently improves the performance across various datasets and pre-trained encoders. In particular, combining a small amount of multimodal data with a large text-only corpus, we improve the state-of-the-art average Spearman's correlation by 1.7%. By analyzing the properties of the textual embedding space, we show that our model excels in aligning semantically similar sentences, providing an explanation for its improved performance.

Logical reasoning is central to complex human activities, such as thinking, debating, and planning; it is also a central component of many AI systems as well. In this paper, we investigate the extent to which encoder-only transformer language models (LMs) can reason according to logical rules. We ask whether those LMs can deduce theorems in propositional calculus and first-order logic; if their relative success in these problems reflects general logical capabilities; and which layers contribute the most to the task. First, we show for several encoder-only LMs that they can be trained, to a reasonable degree, to determine logical validity on various datasets. Next, by cross-probing fine-tuned models on these datasets, we show that LMs have difficulty in transferring their putative logical reasoning ability, which suggests that they may have learned dataset-specific features, instead of a general capability. Finally, we conduct a layerwise probing experiment, which shows that the hypothesis classification task is mostly solved through higher layers.

Text representations using neural word embeddings have proven effective in many NLP applications. Recent researches adapt the traditional word embedding models to learn vectors of multiword expressions (concepts/entities). However, these methods are limited to textual knowledge bases (e.g., Wikipedia). In this paper, we propose a novel and simple technique for integrating the knowledge about concepts from two large scale knowledge bases of different structure (Wikipedia and Probase) in order to learn concept representations. We adapt the efficient skip-gram model to seamlessly learn from the knowledge in Wikipedia text and Probase concept graph. We evaluate our concept embedding models on two tasks: (1) analogical reasoning, where we achieve a state-of-the-art performance of 91% on semantic analogies, (2) concept categorization, where we achieve a state-of-the-art performance on two benchmark datasets achieving categorization accuracy of 100% on one and 98% on the other. Additionally, we present a case study to evaluate our model on unsupervised argument type identification for neural semantic parsing. We demonstrate the competitive accuracy of our unsupervised method and its ability to better generalize to out of vocabulary entity mentions compared to the tedious and error prone methods which depend on gazetteers and regular expressions.

Knowledge graph embedding involves learning representations of entities -- the vertices of the graph -- and relations -- the edges of the graph -- such that the resulting representations encode the known factual information represented by the knowledge graph and can be used in the inference of new relations. We show that knowledge graph embedding is naturally expressed in the topological and categorical language of cellular sheaves: a knowledge graph embedding can be described as an approximate global section of an appropriate knowledge sheaf over the graph, with consistency constraints induced by the knowledge graph's schema. This approach provides a generalized framework for reasoning about knowledge graph embedding models and allows for the expression of a wide range of prior constraints on embeddings. Further, the resulting embeddings can be easily adapted for reasoning over composite relations without special training. We implement these ideas to highlight the benefits of the extensions inspired by this new perspective.

Taking inspiration from Set Theory, we introduce SetCSE, an innovative information retrieval framework. SetCSE employs sets to represent complex semantics and incorporates well-defined operations for structured information querying under the provided context. Within this framework, we introduce an inter-set contrastive learning objective to enhance comprehension of sentence embedding models concerning the given semantics. Furthermore, we present a suite of operations, including SetCSE intersection, difference, and operation series, that leverage sentence embeddings of the enhanced model for complex sentence retrieval tasks. Throughout this paper, we demonstrate that SetCSE adheres to the conventions of human language expressions regarding compounded semantics, provides a significant enhancement in the discriminatory capability of underlying sentence embedding models, and enables numerous information retrieval tasks involving convoluted and intricate prompts which cannot be achieved using existing querying methods.

In this work we propose a simple and efficient framework for learning sentence representations from unlabelled data. Drawing inspiration from the distributional hypothesis and recent work on learning sentence representations, we reformulate the problem of predicting the context in which a sentence appears as a classification problem. Given a sentence and its context, a classifier distinguishes context sentences from other contrastive sentences based on their vector representations. This allows us to efficiently learn different types of encoding functions, and we show that the model learns high-quality sentence representations. We demonstrate that our sentence representations outperform state-of-the-art unsupervised and supervised representation learning methods on several downstream NLP tasks that involve understanding sentence semantics while achieving an order of magnitude speedup in training time.

Despite the fast developmental pace of new sentence embedding methods, it is still challenging to find comprehensive evaluations of these different techniques. In the past years, we saw significant improvements in the field of sentence embeddings and especially towards the development of universal sentence encoders that could provide inductive transfer to a wide variety of downstream tasks. In this work, we perform a comprehensive evaluation of recent methods using a wide variety of downstream and linguistic feature probing tasks. We show that a simple approach using bag-of-words with a recently introduced language model for deep context-dependent word embeddings proved to yield better results in many tasks when compared to sentence encoders trained on entailment datasets. We also show, however, that we are still far away from a universal encoder that can perform consistently across several downstream tasks.

We propose a novel framework for comprehending the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) through the perspective of meta-learning. By conceptualizing reasoning trajectories as pseudo-gradient descent updates to the LLM's parameters, we identify parallels between LLM reasoning and various meta-learning paradigms. We formalize the training process for reasoning tasks as a meta-learning setup, with each question treated as an individual task, and reasoning trajectories serving as the inner loop optimization for adapting model parameters. Once trained on a diverse set of questions, the LLM develops fundamental reasoning capabilities that can generalize to previously unseen questions. Extensive empirical evaluations substantiate the strong connection between LLM reasoning and meta-learning, exploring several issues of significant interest from a meta-learning standpoint. Our work not only enhances the understanding of LLM reasoning but also provides practical insights for improving these models through established meta-learning techniques.

We propose RaDeR, a set of reasoning-based dense retrieval models trained with data derived from mathematical problem solving using large language models (LLMs). Our method leverages retrieval-augmented reasoning trajectories of an LLM and self-reflective relevance evaluation, enabling the creation of both diverse and hard-negative samples for reasoning-intensive relevance. RaDeR retrievers, trained for mathematical reasoning, effectively generalize to diverse reasoning tasks in the BRIGHT and RAR-b benchmarks, consistently outperforming strong baselines in overall performance. Notably, RaDeR achieves significantly higher performance than baselines on the Math and Coding splits. In addition, RaDeR presents the first dense retriever that outperforms BM25 when queries are Chain-of-Thought reasoning steps, underscoring the critical role of reasoning-based retrieval to augment reasoning language models. Furthermore, RaDeR achieves comparable or superior performance while using only 2.5% of the training data used by the concurrent work REASONIR, highlighting the quality of our synthesized training data.

The growing power of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized how people access and utilize information. Notably, the LLMs excel at performing fine-grained data representation, which facilitates precise retrieval of information. They also generate high-quality answers based on external references, enabling the production of useful knowledge. The recent introduction of reasoning models, like OpenAI O1 and DeepSeek R1, marks another leap forward, highlighting LLMs' ability to think progressively before delivering final answers. This breakthrough significantly improves the ability to address complex tasks, e.g., coding and math proofs. Inspired by this progress, we aim to develop similar capabilities for retrieval models, which hold great promise for tackling critical challenges in the field, including multi-task retrieval, zero-shot retrieval, and tasks requiring intensive reasoning of complex relationships. With this motivation, we propose a novel approach called O1 Embedder, which generates useful thoughts for the input query before making retrieval for the target documents. To realize this objective, we conquer two technical difficulties. First, we design a data synthesis workflow, creating training signals for O1 Embedder by generating initial thoughts from an LLM-expert and subsequently refining them using a retrieval committee. Second, we optimize the training process, enabling a pre-trained model to be jointly fine-tuned to generate retrieval thoughts via behavior cloning and perform dense retrieval through contrastive learning. Our approach is evaluated by comprehensive experiments, where substantial improvements are achieved across 12 popular datasets, spanning both in-domain and out-of-domain scenarios. These results highlight O1 Embedder's remarkable accuracy and generalizability, paving the way for the development of next-generation IR foundation models.

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve remarkable performance across various tasks, they often struggle with complex reasoning tasks, such as answering mathematical questions. Recent efforts to address this issue have primarily focused on leveraging mathematical datasets through supervised fine-tuning or self-improvement techniques. However, these methods often depend on high-quality datasets that are difficult to prepare, or they require substantial computational resources for fine-tuning. Inspired by findings that LLMs know how to produce the right answer but struggle to select the correct reasoning path, we propose a purely inference-based searching method -- MindStar (M*). This method formulates reasoning tasks as searching problems and proposes two search ideas to identify the optimal reasoning paths. We evaluate the M* framework on both the GSM8K and MATH datasets, comparing its performance with existing open and closed-source LLMs. Our results demonstrate that M* significantly enhances the reasoning abilities of open-source models, such as Llama-2-13B and Mistral-7B, and achieves comparable performance to GPT-3.5 and Grok-1, but with substantially reduced model size and computational costs.

Vector embeddings have been tasked with an ever-increasing set of retrieval tasks over the years, with a nascent rise in using them for reasoning, instruction-following, coding, and more. These new benchmarks push embeddings to work for any query and any notion of relevance that could be given. While prior works have pointed out theoretical limitations of vector embeddings, there is a common assumption that these difficulties are exclusively due to unrealistic queries, and those that are not can be overcome with better training data and larger models. In this work, we demonstrate that we may encounter these theoretical limitations in realistic settings with extremely simple queries. We connect known results in learning theory, showing that the number of top-k subsets of documents capable of being returned as the result of some query is limited by the dimension of the embedding. We empirically show that this holds true even if we restrict to k=2, and directly optimize on the test set with free parameterized embeddings. We then create a realistic dataset called LIMIT that stress tests models based on these theoretical results, and observe that even state-of-the-art models fail on this dataset despite the simple nature of the task. Our work shows the limits of embedding models under the existing single vector paradigm and calls for future research to develop methods that can resolve this fundamental limitation.

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit impressive capabilities but struggle with reasoning errors due to hallucinations and flawed logic. To investigate their internal representations of reasoning, we introduce ArrangementPuzzle, a novel puzzle dataset with structured solutions and automated stepwise correctness verification. We trained a classifier model on LLM activations on this dataset and found that it achieved over 80% accuracy in predicting reasoning correctness, implying that LLMs internally distinguish between correct and incorrect reasoning steps, with the strongest representations in middle-late Transformer layers. Further analysis reveals that LLMs encode abstract reasoning concepts within the middle activation layers of the transformer architecture, distinguishing logical from semantic equivalence. These findings provide insights into LLM reasoning mechanisms and contribute to improving AI reliability and interpretability, thereby offering the possibility to manipulate and refine LLM reasoning.

Word embeddings have been shown to be useful across state-of-the-art systems in many natural language processing tasks, ranging from question answering systems to dependency parsing. (Herbelot and Vecchi, 2015) explored word embeddings and their utility for modeling language semantics. In particular, they presented an approach to automatically map a standard distributional semantic space onto a set-theoretic model using partial least squares regression. We show in this paper that a simple baseline achieves a +51% relative improvement compared to their model on one of the two datasets they used, and yields competitive results on the second dataset.

Knowledge bases (KBs) and text often contain complementary knowledge: KBs store structured knowledge that can support long range reasoning, while text stores more comprehensive and timely knowledge in an unstructured way. Separately embedding the individual knowledge sources into vector spaces has demonstrated tremendous successes in encoding the respective knowledge, but how to jointly embed and reason with both knowledge sources to fully leverage the complementary information is still largely an open problem. We conduct a large-scale, systematic investigation of aligning KB and text embeddings for joint reasoning. We set up a novel evaluation framework with two evaluation tasks, few-shot link prediction and analogical reasoning, and evaluate an array of KB-text embedding alignment methods. We also demonstrate how such alignment can infuse textual information into KB embeddings for more accurate link prediction on emerging entities and events, using COVID-19 as a case study.

Recent advances in AI-generated content (AIGC) have significantly accelerated image editing techniques, driving increasing demand for diverse and fine-grained edits. Despite these advances, existing image editing methods still face challenges in achieving high precision and semantic accuracy in complex scenarios. Recent studies address this issue by incorporating multimodal large language models (MLLMs) into image editing pipelines. However, current MLLM-based methods mainly rely on interpreting textual instructions, leaving the intrinsic visual understanding of large models largely unexplored, thus resulting in insufficient alignment between textual semantics and visual outcomes. To overcome these limitations, we propose MIND-Edit, an end-to-end image-editing framework integrating pretrained diffusion model with MLLM. MIND-Edit introduces two complementary strategies: (1) a text instruction optimization strategy that clarifies ambiguous user instructions based on semantic reasoning from the MLLM, and (2) an MLLM insight-driven editing strategy that explicitly leverages the intrinsic visual understanding capability of the MLLM to infer editing intent and guide the diffusion process via generated visual embeddings. Furthermore, we propose a joint training approach to effectively integrate both strategies, allowing them to reinforce each other for more accurate instruction interpretation and visually coherent edits aligned with user intent. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MIND-Edit outperforms state-of-the-art image editing methods in both quantitative metrics and visual quality, particularly under complex and challenging scenarios.

We present the surprising finding that a language model's reasoning capabilities can be improved by training on synthetic datasets of chain-of-thought (CoT) traces from more capable models, even when all of those traces lead to an incorrect final answer. Our experiments show this approach can yield better performance on reasoning tasks than training on human-annotated datasets. We hypothesize that two key factors explain this phenomenon: first, the distribution of synthetic data is inherently closer to the language model's own distribution, making it more amenable to learning. Second, these `incorrect' traces are often only partially flawed and contain valid reasoning steps from which the model can learn. To further test the first hypothesis, we use a language model to paraphrase human-annotated traces -- shifting their distribution closer to the model's own distribution -- and show that this improves performance. For the second hypothesis, we introduce increasingly flawed CoT traces and study to what extent models are tolerant to these flaws. We demonstrate our findings across various reasoning domains like math, algorithmic reasoning and code generation using MATH, GSM8K, Countdown and MBPP datasets on various language models ranging from 1.5B to 9B across Qwen, Llama, and Gemma models. Our study shows that curating datasets that are closer to the model's distribution is a critical aspect to consider. We also show that a correct final answer is not always a reliable indicator of a faithful reasoning process.

We present a novel approach for training small language models for reasoning-intensive document ranking that combines knowledge distillation with reinforcement learning optimization. While existing methods often rely on expensive human annotations or large black-box language models, our methodology leverages web data and a teacher LLM to automatically generate high-quality training examples with relevance explanations. By framing document ranking as a reinforcement learning problem and incentivizing explicit reasoning capabilities, we train a compact 3B parameter language model that achieves state-of-the-art performance on the BRIGHT benchmark. Our model ranks third on the leaderboard while using substantially fewer parameters than other approaches, outperforming models that are over 20 times larger. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that generating explanations during inference, rather than directly predicting relevance scores, enables more effective reasoning with smaller language models. The self-supervised nature of our method offers a scalable and interpretable solution for modern information retrieval systems.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) lifts the factuality of Large Language Models (LLMs) by injecting external knowledge, yet it falls short on problems that demand multi-step inference; conversely, purely reasoning-oriented approaches often hallucinate or mis-ground facts. This survey synthesizes both strands under a unified reasoning-retrieval perspective. We first map how advanced reasoning optimizes each stage of RAG (Reasoning-Enhanced RAG). Then, we show how retrieved knowledge of different type supply missing premises and expand context for complex inference (RAG-Enhanced Reasoning). Finally, we spotlight emerging Synergized RAG-Reasoning frameworks, where (agentic) LLMs iteratively interleave search and reasoning to achieve state-of-the-art performance across knowledge-intensive benchmarks. We categorize methods, datasets, and open challenges, and outline research avenues toward deeper RAG-Reasoning systems that are more effective, multimodally-adaptive, trustworthy, and human-centric. The collection is available at https://github.com/DavidZWZ/Awesome-RAG-Reasoning.

Word embeddings and language models have transformed natural language processing (NLP) by facilitating the representation of linguistic elements in continuous vector spaces. This review visits foundational concepts such as the distributional hypothesis and contextual similarity, tracing the evolution from sparse representations like one-hot encoding to dense embeddings including Word2Vec, GloVe, and fastText. We examine both static and contextualized embeddings, underscoring advancements in models such as ELMo, BERT, and GPT and their adaptations for cross-lingual and personalized applications. The discussion extends to sentence and document embeddings, covering aggregation methods and generative topic models, along with the application of embeddings in multimodal domains, including vision, robotics, and cognitive science. Advanced topics such as model compression, interpretability, numerical encoding, and bias mitigation are analyzed, addressing both technical challenges and ethical implications. Additionally, we identify future research directions, emphasizing the need for scalable training techniques, enhanced interpretability, and robust grounding in non-textual modalities. By synthesizing current methodologies and emerging trends, this survey offers researchers and practitioners an in-depth resource to push the boundaries of embedding-based language models.

We investigate compositional structures in data embeddings from pre-trained vision-language models (VLMs). Traditionally, compositionality has been associated with algebraic operations on embeddings of words from a pre-existing vocabulary. In contrast, we seek to approximate representations from an encoder as combinations of a smaller set of vectors in the embedding space. These vectors can be seen as "ideal words" for generating concepts directly within the embedding space of the model. We first present a framework for understanding compositional structures from a geometric perspective. We then explain what these compositional structures entail probabilistically in the case of VLM embeddings, providing intuitions for why they arise in practice. Finally, we empirically explore these structures in CLIP's embeddings and we evaluate their usefulness for solving different vision-language tasks such as classification, debiasing, and retrieval. Our results show that simple linear algebraic operations on embedding vectors can be used as compositional and interpretable methods for regulating the behavior of VLMs.

Logical reasoning is of vital importance to natural language understanding. Previous studies either employ graph-based models to incorporate prior knowledge about logical relations, or introduce symbolic logic into neural models through data augmentation. These methods, however, heavily depend on annotated training data, and thus suffer from over-fitting and poor generalization problems due to the dataset sparsity. To address these two problems, in this paper, we propose MERIt, a MEta-path guided contrastive learning method for logical ReasonIng of text, to perform self-supervised pre-training on abundant unlabeled text data. Two novel strategies serve as indispensable components of our method. In particular, a strategy based on meta-path is devised to discover the logical structure in natural texts, followed by a counterfactual data augmentation strategy to eliminate the information shortcut induced by pre-training. The experimental results on two challenging logical reasoning benchmarks, i.e., ReClor and LogiQA, demonstrate that our method outperforms the SOTA baselines with significant improvements.

Phrase representations play an important role in data science and natural language processing, benefiting various tasks like Entity Alignment, Record Linkage, Fuzzy Joins, and Paraphrase Classification. The current state-of-the-art method involves fine-tuning pre-trained language models for phrasal embeddings using contrastive learning. However, we have identified areas for improvement. First, these pre-trained models tend to be unnecessarily complex and require to be pre-trained on a corpus with context sentences. Second, leveraging the phrase type and morphology gives phrase representations that are both more precise and more flexible. We propose an improved framework to learn phrase representations in a context-free fashion. The framework employs phrase type classification as an auxiliary task and incorporates character-level information more effectively into the phrase representation. Furthermore, we design three granularities of data augmentation to increase the diversity of training samples. Our experiments across a wide range of tasks show that our approach generates superior phrase embeddings compared to previous methods while requiring a smaller model size. The code is available at \faGithub~ https://github.com/tigerchen52/PEARL abstract

The verbosity of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning hinders its mass deployment in efficiency-critical applications. Recently, implicit CoT approaches have emerged, which encode reasoning steps within LLM's hidden embeddings (termed ``implicit reasoning'') rather than explicit tokens. This approach accelerates CoT by reducing the reasoning length and bypassing some LLM components. However, existing implicit CoT methods face two significant challenges: (1) they fail to preserve the semantic alignment between the implicit reasoning (when transformed to natural language) and the ground-truth reasoning, resulting in a significant CoT performance degradation, and (2) they focus on reducing the length of the implicit reasoning; however, they neglect the considerable time cost for an LLM to generate one individual implicit reasoning token. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel semantically-aligned implicit CoT framework termed SemCoT. In particular, for the first challenge, we design a contrastively trained sentence transformer that evaluates semantic alignment between implicit and explicit reasoning, which is used to enforce semantic preservation during implicit reasoning optimization. To address the second challenge, we introduce an efficient implicit reasoning generator by finetuning a lightweight language model using knowledge distillation. This generator is guided by our sentence transformer to distill ground-truth reasoning into semantically aligned implicit reasoning, while also optimizing for accuracy. SemCoT is the first approach that enhances CoT efficiency by jointly optimizing token-level generation speed and preserving semantic alignment with ground-truth reasoning. Extensive experiments demonstrate the superior performance of SemCoT compared to state-of-the-art methods in both efficiency and effectiveness. Our code can be found at https://github.com/YinhanHe123/SemCoT/.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning abilities in complex tasks. However, they lack up-to-date knowledge and experience hallucinations during reasoning, which can lead to incorrect reasoning processes and diminish their performance and trustworthiness. Knowledge graphs (KGs), which capture vast amounts of facts in a structured format, offer a reliable source of knowledge for reasoning. Nevertheless, existing KG-based LLM reasoning methods only treat KGs as factual knowledge bases and overlook the importance of their structural information for reasoning. In this paper, we propose a novel method called reasoning on graphs (RoG) that synergizes LLMs with KGs to enable faithful and interpretable reasoning. Specifically, we present a planning-retrieval-reasoning framework, where RoG first generates relation paths grounded by KGs as faithful plans. These plans are then used to retrieve valid reasoning paths from the KGs for LLMs to conduct faithful reasoning. Furthermore, RoG not only distills knowledge from KGs to improve the reasoning ability of LLMs through training but also allows seamless integration with any arbitrary LLMs during inference. Extensive experiments on two benchmark KGQA datasets demonstrate that RoG achieves state-of-the-art performance on KG reasoning tasks and generates faithful and interpretable reasoning results.

Language models (LMs) are said to be exhibiting reasoning, but what does this entail? We assess definitions of reasoning and how key papers in the field of natural language processing (NLP) use the notion and argue that the definitions provided are not consistent with how LMs are trained, process information, and generate new tokens. To illustrate this incommensurability we assume the view that transformer-based LMs implement an implicit finite-order Markov kernel mapping contexts to conditional token distributions. In this view, reasoning-like outputs correspond to statistical regularities and approximate statistical invariances in the learned kernel rather than the implementation of explicit logical mechanisms. This view is illustrative of the claim that LMs are "statistical pattern matchers"" and not genuine reasoners and provides a perspective that clarifies why reasoning-like outputs arise in LMs without any guarantees of logical consistency. This distinction is fundamental to how epistemic uncertainty is evaluated in LMs. We invite a discussion on the importance of how the computational processes of the systems we build and analyze in NLP research are described.

This work aims to build a text embedder that can capture characteristics of texts specified by user instructions. Despite its tremendous potential to deploy user-oriented embeddings, none of previous approaches provides a concrete solution for it. This paper offers a new viewpoint, which treats the instruction as a question about the input text and encodes the expected answers to obtain the representation accordingly. Intuitively, texts with the same (implicit) semantics would share similar answers following the instruction, thus leading to more similar embeddings. Specifically, we propose InBedder that instantiates this embed-via-answering idea by only fine-tuning language models on abstractive question answering tasks. InBedder demonstrates significantly improved instruction-following capabilities according to our proposed instruction awareness tests and instruction robustness tests, when applied to both large language models (LLMs) (e.g., llama-2-7b) and smaller encoder-based LMs (e.g., roberta-large). Additionally, our qualitative analysis of clustering outcomes, achieved by applying different instructions to the same corpus, demonstrates a high degree of interpretability.

Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has become the standard approach for equipping Large Language Models (LLMs) with up-to-date knowledge. However, standard RAG, relying on independent passage retrieval, often fails to capture the interconnected nature of information required for complex, multi-hop reasoning. While structured RAG methods attempt to address this using knowledge graphs built from triples, we argue that the inherent context loss of triples (context collapse) limits the fidelity of the knowledge representation. We introduce PropRAG, a novel RAG framework that shifts from triples to context-rich propositions and introduces an efficient, LLM-free online beam search over proposition paths to discover multi-step reasoning chains. By coupling a higher-fidelity knowledge representation with explicit path discovery, PropRAG achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot Recall@5 and F1 scores on 2Wiki, HotpotQA, and MuSiQue, advancing non-parametric knowledge integration by improving evidence retrieval through richer representation and efficient reasoning path discovery.

In this work, we aim to connect two research areas: instruction models and retrieval-based models. While instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at extracting information from text, they are not suitable for semantic retrieval. Similarity search over embedding vectors allows to index and query vectors, but the similarity reflected in the embedding is sub-optimal for many use cases. We identify the task of retrieving sentences based on abstract descriptions of their content. We demonstrate the inadequacy of current text embeddings and propose an alternative model that significantly improves when used in standard nearest neighbor search. The model is trained using positive and negative pairs sourced through prompting an a large language model (LLM). While it is easy to source the training material from an LLM, the retrieval task cannot be performed by the LLM directly. This demonstrates that data from LLMs can be used not only for distilling more efficient specialized models than the original LLM, but also for creating new capabilities not immediately possible using the original model.

Investigating the reasoning abilities of transformer models, and discovering new challenging tasks for them, has been a topic of much interest. Recent studies have found these models to be surprisingly strong at performing deductive reasoning over formal logical theories expressed in natural language. A shortcoming of these studies, however, is that they do not take into account that logical theories, when sampled uniformly at random, do not necessarily lead to hard instances. We propose a new methodology for creating challenging algorithmic reasoning datasets that focus on natural language satisfiability (NLSat) problems. The key idea is to draw insights from empirical sampling of hard propositional SAT problems and from complexity-theoretic studies of language. This methodology allows us to distinguish easy from hard instances, and to systematically increase the complexity of existing reasoning benchmarks such as RuleTaker. We find that current transformers, given sufficient training data, are surprisingly robust at solving the resulting NLSat problems of substantially increased difficulty. They also exhibit some degree of scale-invariance - the ability to generalize to problems of larger size and scope. Our results, however, reveal important limitations too: a careful sampling of training data is crucial for building models that generalize to larger problems, and transformer models' limited scale-invariance suggests they are far from learning robust deductive reasoning algorithms.

The recent tremendous success of unsupervised word embeddings in a multitude of applications raises the obvious question if similar methods could be derived to improve embeddings (i.e. semantic representations) of word sequences as well. We present a simple but efficient unsupervised objective to train distributed representations of sentences. Our method outperforms the state-of-the-art unsupervised models on most benchmark tasks, highlighting the robustness of the produced general-purpose sentence embeddings.

Embedding words in high-dimensional vector spaces has proven valuable in many natural language applications. In this work, we investigate whether similarly-trained embeddings of integers can capture concepts that are useful for mathematical applications. We probe the integer embeddings for mathematical knowledge, apply them to a set of numerical reasoning tasks, and show that by learning the representations from mathematical sequence data, we can substantially improve over number embeddings learned from English text corpora.

Embeddings have become a pivotal means to represent complex, multi-faceted information about entities, concepts, and relationships in a condensed and useful format. Nevertheless, they often preclude direct interpretation. While downstream tasks make use of these compressed representations, meaningful interpretation usually requires visualization using dimensionality reduction or specialized machine learning interpretability methods. This paper addresses the challenge of making such embeddings more interpretable and broadly useful, by employing Large Language Models (LLMs) to directly interact with embeddings -- transforming abstract vectors into understandable narratives. By injecting embeddings into LLMs, we enable querying and exploration of complex embedding data. We demonstrate our approach on a variety of diverse tasks, including: enhancing concept activation vectors (CAVs), communicating novel embedded entities, and decoding user preferences in recommender systems. Our work couples the immense information potential of embeddings with the interpretative power of LLMs.

In recent years, large pre-trained language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the ability to follow instructions and perform novel tasks from a few examples. The possibility to parameterise an LLM through such in-context examples widens their capability at a much lower cost than finetuning. We extend this line of reasoning and present a method which further expands the capabilities of an LLM by embedding it within an algorithm or program. To demonstrate the benefits of this approach, we present an illustrative example of evidence-supported question-answering. We obtain a 6.4\% improvement over the chain of thought baseline through a more algorithmic approach without any finetuning. Furthermore, we highlight recent work from this perspective and discuss the advantages and disadvantages in comparison to the standard approaches.

Compositional Reasoning (CR) entails grasping the significance of attributes, relations, and word order. Recent Vision-Language Models (VLMs), comprising a visual encoder and a Large Language Model (LLM) decoder, have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in such reasoning tasks. This prompts a crucial question: have VLMs effectively tackled the CR challenge? We conjecture that existing CR benchmarks may not adequately push the boundaries of modern VLMs due to the reliance on an LLM-only negative text generation pipeline. Consequently, the negatives produced either appear as outliers from the natural language distribution learned by VLMs' LLM decoders or as improbable within the corresponding image context. To address these limitations, we introduce ConMe -- a compositional reasoning benchmark and a novel data generation pipeline leveraging VLMs to produce `hard CR Q&A'. Through a new concept of VLMs conversing with each other to collaboratively expose their weaknesses, our pipeline autonomously generates, evaluates, and selects challenging compositional reasoning questions, establishing a robust CR benchmark, also subsequently validated manually. Our benchmark provokes a noteworthy, up to 33%, decrease in CR performance compared to preceding benchmarks, reinstating the CR challenge even for state-of-the-art VLMs.

Difficult problems, which often result in long reasoning traces, are widely recognized as key factors for enhancing the performance of reasoning models. However, such high-challenge problems are scarce, limiting the size of available datasets. In this paper, we propose a simple method to decouple the reliance on problem difficulty. First, we empirically demonstrate that reasoning length, rather than problem difficulty, primarily influences the performance of trained models. Second, we identify a scaling law on reasoning length, showing that model performance increases in a log-linear fashion as the reasoning data length grows. Finally, we introduce a straightforward technique to generate reasoning data of arbitrary length, and show that synthesized data is effective for training reasoning models. After fine-tuning the Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct language model on our Long1K dataset, we present our model, Long1K-32B, which achieves remarkable performance with only 1,000 training samples, achieving 95.6\% accuracy on MATH, and 71.1\% on GPQA outperforming DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B. The model, code, and dataset are all open-sourced, available at https://huggingface.co/ZTss/LONG1.

Reasoning over knowledge graphs (KGs) is a challenging task that requires a deep understanding of the complex relationships between entities and the underlying logic of their relations. Current approaches rely on learning geometries to embed entities in vector space for logical query operations, but they suffer from subpar performance on complex queries and dataset-specific representations. In this paper, we propose a novel decoupled approach, Language-guided Abstract Reasoning over Knowledge graphs (LARK), that formulates complex KG reasoning as a combination of contextual KG search and logical query reasoning, to leverage the strengths of graph extraction algorithms and large language models (LLM), respectively. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed approach outperforms state-of-the-art KG reasoning methods on standard benchmark datasets across several logical query constructs, with significant performance gain for queries of higher complexity. Furthermore, we show that the performance of our approach improves proportionally to the increase in size of the underlying LLM, enabling the integration of the latest advancements in LLMs for logical reasoning over KGs. Our work presents a new direction for addressing the challenges of complex KG reasoning and paves the way for future research in this area.

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.

Sources of commonsense knowledge support applications in natural language understanding, computer vision, and knowledge graphs. Given their complementarity, their integration is desired. Yet, their different foci, modeling approaches, and sparse overlap make integration difficult. In this paper, we consolidate commonsense knowledge by following five principles, which we apply to combine seven key sources into a first integrated CommonSense Knowledge Graph (CSKG). We analyze CSKG and its various text and graph embeddings, showing that CSKG is well-connected and that its embeddings provide a useful entry point to the graph. We demonstrate how CSKG can provide evidence for generalizable downstream reasoning and for pre-training of language models. CSKG and all its embeddings are made publicly available to support further research on commonsense knowledge integration and reasoning.

Although large language models (LLMs) have recently achieved remarkable performance on various complex reasoning benchmarks, the academic community still lacks an in-depth understanding of base model training processes and data quality. To address this, we construct a large-scale, difficulty-graded reasoning dataset containing approximately 3.34 million unique queries of varying difficulty levels and about 40 million distilled responses generated by multiple models over several passes. Leveraging pass rate and Coefficient of Variation (CV), we precisely select the most valuable training data to enhance reasoning capability. Notably, we observe a training pattern shift, indicating that reasoning-focused training based on base models requires higher learning rates for effective training. Using this carefully selected data, we significantly improve the reasoning capabilities of the base model, achieving a pass rate of 79.2\% on the AIME2024 mathematical reasoning benchmark. This result surpasses most current distilled models and closely approaches state-of-the-art performance. We provide detailed descriptions of our data processing, difficulty assessment, and training methodology, and have publicly released all datasets and methods to promote rapid progress in open-source long-reasoning LLMs. The dataset is available at: https://huggingface.co/datasets/a-m-team/AM-DeepSeek-Distilled-40M

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.

Many modern NLP systems rely on word embeddings, previously trained in an unsupervised manner on large corpora, as base features. Efforts to obtain embeddings for larger chunks of text, such as sentences, have however not been so successful. Several attempts at learning unsupervised representations of sentences have not reached satisfactory enough performance to be widely adopted. In this paper, we show how universal sentence representations trained using the supervised data of the Stanford Natural Language Inference datasets can consistently outperform unsupervised methods like SkipThought vectors on a wide range of transfer tasks. Much like how computer vision uses ImageNet to obtain features, which can then be transferred to other tasks, our work tends to indicate the suitability of natural language inference for transfer learning to other NLP tasks. Our encoder is publicly available.

Sentence-level representations are necessary for various NLP tasks. Recurrent neural networks have proven to be very effective in learning distributed representations and can be trained efficiently on natural language inference tasks. We build on top of one such model and propose a hierarchy of BiLSTM and max pooling layers that implements an iterative refinement strategy and yields state of the art results on the SciTail dataset as well as strong results for SNLI and MultiNLI. We can show that the sentence embeddings learned in this way can be utilized in a wide variety of transfer learning tasks, outperforming InferSent on 7 out of 10 and SkipThought on 8 out of 9 SentEval sentence embedding evaluation tasks. Furthermore, our model beats the InferSent model in 8 out of 10 recently published SentEval probing tasks designed to evaluate sentence embeddings' ability to capture some of the important linguistic properties of sentences.

Text embeddings have attracted growing interest due to their effectiveness across a wide range of natural language processing (NLP) tasks, such as retrieval, classification, clustering, bitext mining, and summarization. With the emergence of pretrained language models (PLMs), general-purpose text embeddings (GPTE) have gained significant traction for their ability to produce rich, transferable representations. The general architecture of GPTE typically leverages PLMs to derive dense text representations, which are then optimized through contrastive learning on large-scale pairwise datasets. In this survey, we provide a comprehensive overview of GPTE in the era of PLMs, focusing on the roles PLMs play in driving its development. We first examine the fundamental architecture and describe the basic roles of PLMs in GPTE, i.e., embedding extraction, expressivity enhancement, training strategies, learning objectives, and data construction. Then, we describe advanced roles enabled by PLMs, such as multilingual support, multimodal integration, code understanding, and scenario-specific adaptation. Finally, we highlight potential future research directions that move beyond traditional improvement goals, including ranking integration, safety considerations, bias mitigation, structural information incorporation, and the cognitive extension of embeddings. This survey aims to serve as a valuable reference for both newcomers and established researchers seeking to understand the current state and future potential of GPTE.

Semantic representation and inference is essential for Natural Language Processing (NLP). The state of the art for semantic representation and inference is deep learning, and particularly Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs), Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs), and transformer Self-Attention models. This thesis investigates the use of deep learning for novel semantic representation and inference, and makes contributions in the following three areas: creating training data, improving semantic representations and extending inference learning. In terms of creating training data, we contribute the largest publicly available dataset of real-life factual claims for the purpose of automatic claim verification (MultiFC), and we present a novel inference model composed of multi-scale CNNs with different kernel sizes that learn from external sources to infer fact checking labels. In terms of improving semantic representations, we contribute a novel model that captures non-compositional semantic indicators. By definition, the meaning of a non-compositional phrase cannot be inferred from the individual meanings of its composing words (e.g., hot dog). Motivated by this, we operationalize the compositionality of a phrase contextually by enriching the phrase representation with external word embeddings and knowledge graphs. Finally, in terms of inference learning, we propose a series of novel deep learning architectures that improve inference by using syntactic dependencies, by ensembling role guided attention heads, incorporating gating layers, and concatenating multiple heads in novel and effective ways. This thesis consists of seven publications (five published and two under review).

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.

The remarkable success of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has driven advances in multimodal embeddings, yet existing models remain inherently discriminative, limiting their ability to benefit from reasoning-driven generation paradigm. In this work, we pioneer the exploration of generative embeddings, unifying embedding tasks within a generative paradigm. We propose UME-R1, a universal multimodal embedding framework consisting of a two-stage training strategy: a cold-start supervised fine-tuning equips the model with reasoning capabilities and enables it to generate both discriminative and generative embeddings; a subsequent reinforcement learning enhances reasoning and further optimizes generative embedding quality. This pioneering work reveals four key insights: 1) generative embeddings unlock substantial performance gains over conventional discriminative embeddings by leveraging the powerful generative reasoning capabilities of MLLMs; 2) discriminative and generative embeddings are complementary, whose combined oracle performance far exceeding that of either alone; 3) RL can effectively enhance generative embeddings, establishing a scalable optimization paradigm.; 4) repeated sampling at inference boosts downstream task coverage (pass@k), highlighting the inference-time scalability potential of generative embeddings. Evaluated on the MMEB-V2 benchmark across 78 tasks spanning video, image, and visual documents, UME-R1 significantly outperforms conventional discriminative embedding models and offers a foundation for more interpretable, reasoning-driven generative multimodal embeddings. Our code, models, and datasets will be publicly available at https://github.com/XMUDeepLIT/UME-R1.

Recent advancements in transformer-based models have initiated research interests in investigating their ability to learn to perform reasoning tasks. However, most of the contexts used for this purpose are in practice very simple: generated from short (fragments of) first-order logic sentences with only a few logical operators and quantifiers. In this work, we construct the natural language dataset, DELTA_D, using the description logic language ALCQ. DELTA_D contains 384K examples, and increases in two dimensions: i) reasoning depth, and ii) linguistic complexity. In this way, we systematically investigate the reasoning ability of a supervised fine-tuned DeBERTa-based model and of two large language models (GPT-3.5, GPT-4) with few-shot prompting. Our results demonstrate that the DeBERTa-based model can master the reasoning task and that the performance of GPTs can improve significantly even when a small number of samples is provided (9 shots). We open-source our code and datasets.

Reasoning large language models have recently achieved state-of-the-art performance in many fields. However, their long-form chain-of-thought reasoning creates interpretability challenges as each generated token depends on all previous ones, making the computation harder to decompose. We argue that analyzing reasoning traces at the sentence level is a promising approach to understanding reasoning processes. We present three complementary attribution methods: (1) a black-box method measuring each sentence's counterfactual importance by comparing final answers across 100 rollouts conditioned on the model generating that sentence or one with a different meaning; (2) a white-box method of aggregating attention patterns between pairs of sentences, which identified ``broadcasting'' sentences that receive disproportionate attention from all future sentences via ``receiver'' attention heads; (3) a causal attribution method measuring logical connections between sentences by suppressing attention toward one sentence and measuring the effect on each future sentence's tokens. Each method provides evidence for the existence of thought anchors, reasoning steps that have outsized importance and that disproportionately influence the subsequent reasoning process. These thought anchors are typically planning or backtracking sentences. We provide an open-source tool (www.thought-anchors.com) for visualizing the outputs of our methods, and present a case study showing converging patterns across methods that map how a model performs multi-step reasoning. The consistency across methods demonstrates the potential of sentence-level analysis for a deeper understanding of reasoning models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit strong potential in mathematical reasoning, yet their effectiveness is often limited by a shortage of high-quality queries. This limitation necessitates scaling up computational responses through self-generated data, yet current methods struggle due to spurious correlated data caused by ineffective exploration across all reasoning stages. To address such challenge, we introduce MARGE: Improving Math Reasoning with Guided Exploration, a novel method to address this issue and enhance mathematical reasoning through hit-guided exploration. MARGE systematically explores intermediate reasoning states derived from self-generated solutions, enabling adequate exploration and improved credit assignment throughout the reasoning process. Through extensive experiments across multiple backbone models and benchmarks, we demonstrate that MARGE significantly improves reasoning capabilities without requiring external annotations or training additional value models. Notably, MARGE improves both single-shot accuracy and exploration diversity, mitigating a common trade-off in alignment methods. These results demonstrate MARGE's effectiveness in enhancing mathematical reasoning capabilities and unlocking the potential of scaling self-generated training data. Our code and models are available at https://github.com/georgao35/MARGE{this link}.

State-of-the-art deep-learning-based approaches to Natural Language Processing (NLP) are credited with various capabilities that involve reasoning with natural language texts. In this paper we carry out a large-scale empirical study investigating the detection of formally valid inferences in controlled fragments of natural language for which the satisfiability problem becomes increasingly complex. We find that, while transformer-based language models perform surprisingly well in these scenarios, a deeper analysis re-veals that they appear to overfit to superficial patterns in the data rather than acquiring the logical principles governing the reasoning in these fragments.

We study how large language models (LLMs) ``think'' through their representation space. We propose a novel geometric framework that models an LLM's reasoning as flows -- embedding trajectories evolving where logic goes. We disentangle logical structure from semantics by employing the same natural deduction propositions with varied semantic carriers, allowing us to test whether LLMs internalize logic beyond surface form. This perspective connects reasoning with geometric quantities such as position, velocity, and curvature, enabling formal analysis in representation and concept spaces. Our theory establishes: (1) LLM reasoning corresponds to smooth flows in representation space, and (2) logical statements act as local controllers of these flows' velocities. Using learned representation proxies, we design controlled experiments to visualize and quantify reasoning flows, providing empirical validation of our theoretical framework. Our work serves as both a conceptual foundation and practical tools for studying reasoning phenomenon, offering a new lens for interpretability and formal analysis of LLMs' behavior.

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.

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.

Semantic code search is the task of retrieving a code snippet given a textual description of its functionality. Recent work has been focused on using similarity metrics between neural embeddings of text and code. However, current language models are known to struggle with longer, compositional text, and multi-step reasoning. To overcome this limitation, we propose supplementing the query sentence with a layout of its semantic structure. The semantic layout is used to break down the final reasoning decision into a series of lower-level decisions. We use a Neural Module Network architecture to implement this idea. We compare our model - NS3 (Neuro-Symbolic Semantic Search) - to a number of baselines, including state-of-the-art semantic code retrieval methods, and evaluate on two datasets - CodeSearchNet and Code Search and Question Answering. We demonstrate that our approach results in more precise code retrieval, and we study the effectiveness of our modular design when handling compositional queries.

Reasoning-enhanced large language models (RLLMs), whether explicitly trained for reasoning or prompted via chain-of-thought (CoT), have achieved state-of-the-art performance on many complex reasoning tasks. However, we uncover a surprising and previously overlooked phenomenon: explicit CoT reasoning can significantly degrade instruction-following accuracy. Evaluating 15 models on two benchmarks: IFEval (with simple, rule-verifiable constraints) and ComplexBench (with complex, compositional constraints), we consistently observe performance drops when CoT prompting is applied. Through large-scale case studies and an attention-based analysis, we identify common patterns where reasoning either helps (e.g., with formatting or lexical precision) or hurts (e.g., by neglecting simple constraints or introducing unnecessary content). We propose a metric, constraint attention, to quantify model focus during generation and show that CoT reasoning often diverts attention away from instruction-relevant tokens. To mitigate these effects, we introduce and evaluate four strategies: in-context learning, self-reflection, self-selective reasoning, and classifier-selective reasoning. Our results demonstrate that selective reasoning strategies, particularly classifier-selective reasoning, can substantially recover lost performance. To our knowledge, this is the first work to systematically expose reasoning-induced failures in instruction-following and offer practical mitigation strategies.

We introduce Rank1, the first reranking model trained to take advantage of test-time compute. Rank1 demonstrates the applicability within retrieval of using a reasoning language model (i.e. OpenAI's o1, Deepseek's R1, etc.) for distillation in order to rapidly improve the performance of a smaller model. We gather and open-source a dataset of more than 600,000 examples of R1 reasoning traces from queries and passages in MS MARCO. Models trained on this dataset show: (1) state-of-the-art performance on advanced reasoning and instruction following datasets; (2) work remarkably well out of distribution due to the ability to respond to user-input prompts; and (3) have explainable reasoning chains that can be given to users or RAG-based systems. Further, we demonstrate that quantized versions of these models retain strong performance while using less compute/memory. Overall, Rank1 shows that test-time compute allows for a fundamentally new type of explainable and performant reranker model for search.

Reasoning presents a significant and challenging issue for Large Language Models (LLMs). The predominant focus of research has revolved around developing diverse prompting strategies to guide and structure the reasoning processes of LLMs. However, these approaches based on decoder-only causal language models often operate the input question in a single forward pass, potentially missing the rich, back-and-forth interactions inherent in human reasoning. Scant attention has been paid to a critical dimension, i.e., the input question itself embedded within the prompts. In response, we introduce a deceptively simple yet highly effective prompting strategy, termed question "re-reading". Drawing inspiration from human learning and problem-solving, re-reading entails revisiting the question information embedded within input prompts. This approach aligns seamlessly with the cognitive principle of reinforcement, enabling LLMs to extract deeper insights, identify intricate patterns, establish more nuanced connections, and ultimately enhance their reasoning capabilities across various tasks. Experiments conducted on a series of reasoning benchmarks serve to underscore the effectiveness and generality of our method. Moreover, our findings demonstrate that our approach seamlessly integrates with various language models, though-eliciting prompting methods, and ensemble techniques, further underscoring its versatility and compatibility in the realm of LLMs.

Transformers have been shown to be able to perform deductive reasoning on a logical rulebase containing rules and statements written in English natural language. While the progress is promising, it is currently unclear if these models indeed perform logical reasoning by understanding the underlying logical semantics in the language. To this end, we propose RobustLR, a suite of evaluation datasets that evaluate the robustness of these models to minimal logical edits in rulebases and some standard logical equivalence conditions. In our experiments with RoBERTa and T5, we find that the models trained in prior works do not perform consistently on the different perturbations in RobustLR, thus showing that the models are not robust to the proposed logical perturbations. Further, we find that the models find it especially hard to learn logical negation and disjunction operators. Overall, using our evaluation sets, we demonstrate some shortcomings of the deductive reasoning-based language models, which can eventually help towards designing better models for logical reasoning over natural language. All the datasets and code base have been made publicly available.

Beginning with McCarthy's Advice Taker (1959), AI has pursued the goal of providing a system with explicit, general knowledge and having the system reason over that knowledge. However, expressing the knowledge in a formal (logical or probabilistic) representation has been a major obstacle to this research. This paper investigates a modern approach to this problem where the facts and rules are provided as natural language sentences, thus bypassing a formal representation. We train transformers to reason (or emulate reasoning) over these sentences using synthetically generated data. Our models, that we call RuleTakers, provide the first empirical demonstration that this kind of soft reasoning over language is learnable, can achieve high (99%) accuracy, and generalizes to test data requiring substantially deeper chaining than seen during training (95%+ scores). We also demonstrate that the models transfer well to two hand-authored rulebases, and to rulebases paraphrased into more natural language. These findings are significant as it suggests a new role for transformers, namely as limited "soft theorem provers" operating over explicit theories in language. This in turn suggests new possibilities for explainability, correctability, and counterfactual reasoning in question-answering.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting has achieved remarkable success in unlocking the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Although CoT prompting enhances reasoning, its verbosity imposes substantial computational overhead. Recent works often focus exclusively on outcome alignment and lack supervision on the intermediate reasoning process. These deficiencies obscure the analyzability of the latent reasoning chain. To address these challenges, we introduce Render-of-Thought (RoT), the first framework to reify the reasoning chain by rendering textual steps into images, making the latent rationale explicit and traceable. Specifically, we leverage the vision encoders of existing Vision Language Models (VLMs) as semantic anchors to align the vision embeddings with the textual space. This design ensures plug-and-play implementation without incurring additional pre-training overhead. Extensive experiments on mathematical and logical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our method achieves 3-4x token compression and substantial inference acceleration compared to explicit CoT. Furthermore, it maintains competitive performance against other methods, validating the feasibility of this paradigm. Our code is available at https://github.com/TencentBAC/RoT

In this work, we introduce a new unsupervised embedding method, Meta-Task Prompting with Explicit One-Word Limitation (MetaEOL), for generating high-quality sentence embeddings from Large Language Models (LLMs) without the need for model fine-tuning or task-specific engineering. Leveraging meta-task prompting, MetaEOL guides LLMs to produce embeddings through a series of carefully designed prompts that address multiple representational aspects. Our comprehensive experiments demonstrate that embeddings averaged from various meta-tasks yield competitive performance on Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) benchmarks and excel in downstream tasks, surpassing contrastive-trained models. Our findings suggest a new scaling law for embedding generation, offering a versatile, resource-efficient approach for embedding extraction across diverse sentence-centric scenarios.

Transformers, as a fundamental deep learning architecture, have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in reasoning. This paper investigates the generalizable first-order logical reasoning ability of transformers with their parameterized knowledge and explores ways to improve it. The first-order reasoning capability of transformers is assessed through their ability to perform first-order logical entailment, which is quantitatively measured by their performance in answering knowledge graph queries. We establish connections between (1) two types of distribution shifts studied in out-of-distribution generalization and (2) the unseen knowledge and query settings discussed in the task of knowledge graph query answering, enabling a characterization of fine-grained generalizability. Results on our comprehensive dataset show that transformers outperform previous methods specifically designed for this task and provide detailed empirical evidence on the impact of input query syntax, token embedding, and transformer architectures on the reasoning capability of transformers. Interestingly, our findings reveal a mismatch between positional encoding and other design choices in transformer architectures employed in prior practices. This discovery motivates us to propose a more sophisticated, logic-aware architecture, TEGA, to enhance the capability for generalizable first-order logical entailment in transformers.

Recent work by (Richardson and Kuhn, 2017a,b; Richardson et al., 2018) looks at semantic parser induction and question answering in the domain of source code libraries and APIs. In this brief note, we formalize the representations being learned in these studies and introduce a simple domain specific language and a systematic translation from this language to first-order logic. By recasting the target representations in terms of classical logic, we aim to broaden the applicability of existing code datasets for investigating more complex natural language understanding and reasoning problems in the software domain.

Language models often achieve higher accuracy when reasoning step-by-step in complex tasks. However, their reasoning can be unsound, inconsistent, or rely on undesirable prior assumptions. To tackle these issues, we introduce a class of tools for language models called guides that use state and incremental constraints to guide generation. A guide can be invoked by the model to constrain its own generation to a set of valid statements given by the tool. In turn, the model's choices can change the guide's state. We show how a general system for logical reasoning can be used as a guide, which we call LogicGuide. Given a reasoning problem in natural language, a model can formalize its assumptions for LogicGuide and then guarantee that its reasoning steps are sound. In experiments with the PrOntoQA and ProofWriter reasoning datasets, LogicGuide significantly improves the performance of GPT-3, GPT-3.5 Turbo and LLaMA (accuracy gains up to 35%). LogicGuide also drastically reduces content effects: the interference of prior and current assumptions that both humans and language models have been shown to suffer from. Finally, we explore bootstrapping LLaMA 13B from its own reasoning and find that LogicGuide is critical: by training only on certified self-generated reasoning, LLaMA can self-improve, avoiding learning from its own hallucinations.

Deep learning methods are highly accurate, yet their opaque decision process prevents them from earning full human trust. Concept-based models aim to address this issue by learning tasks based on a set of human-understandable concepts. However, state-of-the-art concept-based models rely on high-dimensional concept embedding representations which lack a clear semantic meaning, thus questioning the interpretability of their decision process. To overcome this limitation, we propose the Deep Concept Reasoner (DCR), the first interpretable concept-based model that builds upon concept embeddings. In DCR, neural networks do not make task predictions directly, but they build syntactic rule structures using concept embeddings. DCR then executes these rules on meaningful concept truth degrees to provide a final interpretable and semantically-consistent prediction in a differentiable manner. Our experiments show that DCR: (i) improves up to +25% w.r.t. state-of-the-art interpretable concept-based models on challenging benchmarks (ii) discovers meaningful logic rules matching known ground truths even in the absence of concept supervision during training, and (iii), facilitates the generation of counterfactual examples providing the learnt rules as guidance.

One of the main methods for computational interpretation of a text is mapping it into a vector in some embedding space. Such vectors can then be used for a variety of textual processing tasks. Recently, most embedding spaces are a product of training large language models (LLMs). One major drawback of this type of representation is their incomprehensibility to humans. Understanding the embedding space is crucial for several important needs, including the need to debug the embedding method and compare it to alternatives, and the need to detect biases hidden in the model. In this paper, we present a novel method of understanding embeddings by transforming a latent embedding space into a comprehensible conceptual space. We present an algorithm for deriving a conceptual space with dynamic on-demand granularity. We devise a new evaluation method, using either human rater or LLM-based raters, to show that the conceptualized vectors indeed represent the semantics of the original latent ones. We show the use of our method for various tasks, including comparing the semantics of alternative models and tracing the layers of the LLM. The code is available online https://github.com/adiSimhi/Interpreting-Embedding-Spaces-by-Conceptualization.

While paragraph embedding models are remarkably effective for downstream classification tasks, what they learn and encode into a single vector remains opaque. In this paper, we investigate a state-of-the-art paragraph embedding method proposed by Zhang et al. (2017) and discover that it cannot reliably tell whether a given sentence occurs in the input paragraph or not. We formulate a sentence content task to probe for this basic linguistic property and find that even a much simpler bag-of-words method has no trouble solving it. This result motivates us to replace the reconstruction-based objective of Zhang et al. (2017) with our sentence content probe objective in a semi-supervised setting. Despite its simplicity, our objective improves over paragraph reconstruction in terms of (1) downstream classification accuracies on benchmark datasets, (2) faster training, and (3) better generalization ability.

Pre-trained language models have been found to capture a surprisingly rich amount of lexical knowledge, ranging from commonsense properties of everyday concepts to detailed factual knowledge about named entities. Among others, this makes it possible to distill high-quality word vectors from pre-trained language models. However, it is currently unclear to what extent it is possible to distill relation embeddings, i.e. vectors that characterize the relationship between two words. Such relation embeddings are appealing because they can, in principle, encode relational knowledge in a more fine-grained way than is possible with knowledge graphs. To obtain relation embeddings from a pre-trained language model, we encode word pairs using a (manually or automatically generated) prompt, and we fine-tune the language model such that relationally similar word pairs yield similar output vectors. We find that the resulting relation embeddings are highly competitive on analogy (unsupervised) and relation classification (supervised) benchmarks, even without any task-specific fine-tuning. Source code to reproduce our experimental results and the model checkpoints are available in the following repository: https://github.com/asahi417/relbert

Due to their similarity-based learning objectives, pretrained sentence encoders often internalize stereotypical assumptions that reflect the social biases that exist within their training corpora. In this paper, we describe several kinds of stereotypes concerning different communities that are present in popular sentence representation models, including pretrained next sentence prediction and contrastive sentence representation models. We compare such models to textual entailment models that learn language logic for a variety of downstream language understanding tasks. By comparing strong pretrained models based on text similarity with textual entailment learning, we conclude that the explicit logic learning with textual entailment can significantly reduce bias and improve the recognition of social communities, without an explicit de-biasing process

Although many benchmarks evaluate the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) within domains such as mathematics, coding, or data wrangling, few abstract away from domain specifics to examine reasoning as a capability in and of itself. We contribute a novel type of benchmark evaluating the inductive reasoning capabilities of LLMs that is inspired by the forward reconstruction task from historical linguistics but is formulated in an extremely simple, general way (in the form of Programming by Examples). The task involves generating a cascade of simple string rewrite programs to transform a given list of input strings into a list of desired output strings. We present a fully automated pipeline that programmatically generates problems of this type with controllable difficulty, enabling scalable evaluation of reasoning models while avoiding contamination. Using this approach, we construct two benchmarks: PBEBench-Lite, which efficiently stratifies models of varying capabilities, and PBEBench, which requires models to induce programs similar in complexity to those constructed by historical linguists. Our experiments reveal a substantial performance gap between models that leverage test-time compute or LCoT (long chain-of-thought) reasoning and those that do not. Moreover, although recent models show promise, the solve rate for both of them drops below 5% for hard instances of the PBEBench dataset (ground truth cascade lengths of 20 and 30, respectively), falling well short of realistic historical linguistics requirements even with computationally expensive, popular scaling techniques from the PBE and reasoning literature. Additionally, we also study the effectiveness of different scaling strategies and the impact of various hyperparameters on the difficulty of the generated data using gpt-oss-120b, the best-performing open-source model.

Understanding entailment and contradiction is fundamental to understanding natural language, and inference about entailment and contradiction is a valuable testing ground for the development of semantic representations. However, machine learning research in this area has been dramatically limited by the lack of large-scale resources. To address this, we introduce the Stanford Natural Language Inference corpus, a new, freely available collection of labeled sentence pairs, written by humans doing a novel grounded task based on image captioning. At 570K pairs, it is two orders of magnitude larger than all other resources of its type. This increase in scale allows lexicalized classifiers to outperform some sophisticated existing entailment models, and it allows a neural network-based model to perform competitively on natural language inference benchmarks for the first time.

Understanding the locus of semantic representation in large language models (LLMs) is crucial for interpretability and architectural innovation. The dominant paradigm posits that trainable input embeddings serve as foundational "meaning vectors." This paper challenges that view. We construct Transformer models where the embedding layer is entirely frozen, with vectors derived not from data, but from the visual structure of Unicode glyphs. These non-semantic, precomputed visual embeddings are fixed throughout training. Our method is compatible with any tokenizer, including a novel Unicode-centric tokenizer we introduce to ensure universal text coverage. Despite the absence of trainable, semantically initialized embeddings, our models converge, generate coherent text, and, critically, outperform architecturally identical models with trainable embeddings on the MMLU reasoning benchmark. We attribute this to "representational interference" in conventional models, where the embedding layer is burdened with learning both structural and semantic features. Our results indicate that high-level semantics are not inherent to input embeddings but are an emergent property of the Transformer's compositional architecture and data scale. This reframes the role of embeddings from meaning containers to structural primitives. We release all code and models to foster further research.

We endow Large Language Models (LLMs) with fine-grained self-evaluation to refine multi-step reasoning inference. We propose an effective prompting approach that integrates self-evaluation guidance through stochastic beam search. Our approach explores the reasoning search space using a well-calibrated automatic criterion. This enables an efficient search to produce higher-quality final predictions. With the self-evaluation guided stochastic beam search, we also balance the quality-diversity trade-off in the generation of reasoning chains. This allows our approach to adapt well with majority voting and surpass the corresponding Codex-backboned baselines by 6.34%, 9.56%, and 5.46% on the GSM8K, AQuA, and StrategyQA benchmarks, respectively, in few-shot accuracy. Analysis of our decompositional reasoning finds it pinpoints logic failures and leads to higher consistency and robustness. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/YuxiXie/SelfEval-Guided-Decoding.

Question-answering datasets require a broad set of reasoning skills. We show how to use question decompositions to teach language models these broad reasoning skills in a robust fashion. Specifically, we use widely available QDMR representations to programmatically create hard-to-cheat synthetic contexts for real questions in six multi-step reasoning datasets. These contexts are carefully designed to avoid reasoning shortcuts prevalent in real contexts that prevent models from learning the right skills. This results in a pretraining dataset, named TeaBReaC, containing 525K multi-step questions (with associated formal programs) covering about 900 reasoning patterns. We show that pretraining standard language models (LMs) on TeaBReaC before fine-tuning them on target datasets improves their performance by up to 13 F1 points across 4 multi-step QA datasets, with up to 21 point gain on more complex questions. The resulting models also demonstrate higher robustness, with a 5-8 F1 point improvement on two contrast sets. Furthermore, TeaBReaC pretraining substantially improves model performance and robustness even when starting with numerate LMs pretrained using recent methods (e.g., PReasM, POET). Our work thus shows how to effectively use decomposition-guided contexts to robustly teach multi-step reasoning.

Entity resolution is a widely studied problem with several proposals to match records across relations. Matching textual content is a widespread task in many applications, such as question answering and search. While recent methods achieve promising results for these two tasks, there is no clear solution for the more general problem of matching textual content and structured data. We introduce a framework that supports this new task in an unsupervised setting for any pair of corpora, being relational tables or text documents. Our method builds a fine-grained graph over the content of the corpora and derives word embeddings to represent the objects to match in a low dimensional space. The learned representation enables effective and efficient matching at different granularity, from relational tuples to text sentences and paragraphs. Our flexible framework can exploit pre-trained resources, but it does not depends on their existence and achieves better quality performance in matching content when the vocabulary is domain specific. We also introduce optimizations in the graph creation process with an "expand and compress" approach that first identifies new valid relationships across elements, to improve matching, and then prunes nodes and edges, to reduce the graph size. Experiments on real use cases and public datasets show that our framework produces embeddings that outperform word embeddings and fine-tuned language models both in results' quality and in execution times.

Large language models have been shown to suffer from reasoning inconsistency issues. That is, they fail more in situations unfamiliar to the training data, even though exact or very similar reasoning paths exist in more common cases that they can successfully solve. Such observations motivate us to propose methods that encourage models to understand the high-level and abstract reasoning processes during training instead of only the final answer. This way, models can transfer the exact solution to similar cases, regardless of their relevance to the pre-training data distribution. In this work, we propose SAL, a self-supervised analogical learning framework. SAL mimics the human analogy process and trains models to explicitly transfer high-quality symbolic solutions from cases that they know how to solve to other rare cases in which they tend to fail more. We show that the resulting models after SAL learning outperform base language models on a wide range of reasoning benchmarks, such as StrategyQA, GSM8K, and HotpotQA, by 2% to 20%. At the same time, we show that our model is more generalizable and controllable through analytical studies.

Reasoning, as an essential ability for complex problem-solving, can provide back-end support for various real-world applications, such as medical diagnosis, negotiation, etc. This paper provides a comprehensive survey of cutting-edge research on reasoning with language model prompting. We introduce research works with comparisons and summaries and provide systematic resources to help beginners. We also discuss the potential reasons for emerging such reasoning abilities and highlight future research directions. Resources are available at https://github.com/zjunlp/Prompt4ReasoningPapers (updated periodically).

We present a systematic investigation of layer-wise BERT activations for general-purpose text representations to understand what linguistic information they capture and how transferable they are across different tasks. Sentence-level embeddings are evaluated against two state-of-the-art models on downstream and probing tasks from SentEval, while passage-level embeddings are evaluated on four question-answering (QA) datasets under a learning-to-rank problem setting. Embeddings from the pre-trained BERT model perform poorly in semantic similarity and sentence surface information probing tasks. Fine-tuning BERT on natural language inference data greatly improves the quality of the embeddings. Combining embeddings from different BERT layers can further boost performance. BERT embeddings outperform BM25 baseline significantly on factoid QA datasets at the passage level, but fail to perform better than BM25 on non-factoid datasets. For all QA datasets, there is a gap between embedding-based method and in-domain fine-tuned BERT (we report new state-of-the-art results on two datasets), which suggests deep interactions between question and answer pairs are critical for those hard tasks.

The development of large language models (LLM) has shown progress on reasoning, though studies have largely considered either English or simple reasoning tasks. To address this, we introduce a multilingual structured reasoning and explanation dataset, termed xSTREET, that covers four tasks across six languages. xSTREET exposes a gap in base LLM performance between English and non-English reasoning tasks. We then propose two methods to remedy this gap, building on the insight that LLMs trained on code are better reasoners. First, at training time, we augment a code dataset with multilingual comments using machine translation while keeping program code as-is. Second, at inference time, we bridge the gap between training and inference by employing a prompt structure that incorporates step-by-step code primitives to derive new facts and find a solution. Our methods show improved multilingual performance on xSTREET, most notably on the scientific commonsense reasoning subtask. Furthermore, the models show no regression on non-reasoning tasks, thus demonstrating our techniques maintain general-purpose abilities.

Analyzing the pattern of semantic variation in long real-world texts such as books or transcripts is interesting from the stylistic, cognitive, and linguistic perspectives. It is also useful for applications such as text segmentation, document summarization, and detection of semantic novelty. The recent emergence of several vector-space methods for sentence embedding has made such analysis feasible. However, this raises the issue of how consistent and meaningful the semantic representations produced by various methods are in themselves. In this paper, we compare several recent sentence embedding methods via time-series of semantic similarity between successive sentences and matrices of pairwise sentence similarity for multiple books of literature. In contrast to previous work using target tasks and curated datasets to compare sentence embedding methods, our approach provides an evaluation of the methods 'in the wild'. We find that most of the sentence embedding methods considered do infer highly correlated patterns of semantic similarity in a given document, but show interesting differences.

This article focuses on the development and evaluation of Small-sized Czech sentence embedding models. Small models are important components for real-time industry applications in resource-constrained environments. Given the limited availability of labeled Czech data, alternative approaches, including pre-training, knowledge distillation, and unsupervised contrastive fine-tuning, are investigated. Comprehensive intrinsic and extrinsic analyses are conducted, showcasing the competitive performance of our models compared to significantly larger counterparts, with approximately 8 times smaller size and 5 times faster speed than conventional Base-sized models. To promote cooperation and reproducibility, both the models and the evaluation pipeline are made publicly accessible. Ultimately, this article presents practical applications of the developed sentence embedding models in Seznam.cz, the Czech search engine. These models have effectively replaced previous counterparts, enhancing the overall search experience for instance, in organic search, featured snippets, and image search. This transition has yielded improved performance.

Extracting sentence embeddings from large language models (LLMs) is a promising direction, as LLMs have demonstrated stronger semantic understanding capabilities. Previous studies typically focus on prompt engineering to elicit sentence embeddings from LLMs by prompting the model to encode sentence information into the embedding of the last token. However, LLMs are mostly decoder-only models with causal attention and the earlier tokens in the sentence cannot attend to the latter tokens, resulting in biased encoding of sentence information and cascading effects on the final decoded token. To this end, we propose a novel Token Prepending (TP) technique that prepends each layer's decoded sentence embedding to the beginning of the sentence in the next layer's input, allowing earlier tokens to attend to the complete sentence information under the causal attention mechanism. The proposed TP technique is a plug-and-play and training-free technique, which means it can be seamlessly integrated with various prompt-based sentence embedding methods and autoregressive LLMs. Extensive experiments on various Semantic Textual Similarity (STS) tasks and downstream classification tasks demonstrate that our proposed TP technique can significantly improve the performance of existing prompt-based sentence embedding methods across different LLMs, while incurring negligible additional inference cost.

Embedding text sequences is a widespread requirement in modern language understanding. Existing approaches focus largely on constant-size representations. This is problematic, as the amount of information contained in text often varies with the length of the input. We propose a solution called Nugget, which encodes language into a representation based on a dynamically selected subset of input tokens. These nuggets are learned through tasks like autoencoding and machine translation, and intuitively segment language into meaningful units. We demonstrate Nugget outperforms related approaches in tasks involving semantic comparison. Finally, we illustrate these compact units allow for expanding the contextual window of a language model (LM), suggesting new future LMs that can condition on significantly larger amounts of content.

This paper examines the encoding of analogy in large-scale pretrained language models, such as BERT and GPT-2. Existing analogy datasets typically focus on a limited set of analogical relations, with a high similarity of the two domains between which the analogy holds. As a more realistic setup, we introduce the Scientific and Creative Analogy dataset (SCAN), a novel analogy dataset containing systematic mappings of multiple attributes and relational structures across dissimilar domains. Using this dataset, we test the analogical reasoning capabilities of several widely-used pretrained language models (LMs). We find that state-of-the-art LMs achieve low performance on these complex analogy tasks, highlighting the challenges still posed by analogy understanding.

Word and sentence embeddings are useful feature representations in natural language processing. However, intrinsic evaluation for embeddings lags far behind, and there has been no significant update since the past decade. Word and sentence similarity tasks have become the de facto evaluation method. It leads models to overfit to such evaluations, negatively impacting embedding models' development. This paper first points out the problems using semantic similarity as the gold standard for word and sentence embedding evaluations. Further, we propose a new intrinsic evaluation method called EvalRank, which shows a much stronger correlation with downstream tasks. Extensive experiments are conducted based on 60+ models and popular datasets to certify our judgments. Finally, the practical evaluation toolkit is released for future benchmarking purposes.

Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex reasoning tasks by generating intermediate reasoning steps. However, most existing approaches focus on hard token decoding, which constrains reasoning within the discrete vocabulary space and may not always be optimal. While recent efforts explore continuous-space reasoning, they often suffer from catastrophic forgetting, limiting their applicability to state-of-the-art LLMs that already perform well in zero-shot settings with a proper instruction. To address this challenge, we propose a novel approach for continuous-space reasoning that does not require modifying the underlying LLM. Specifically, we employ a lightweight assistant model to generate instance-specific soft thought tokens speculatively as the initial chain of thoughts, which are then mapped into the LLM's representation space via a projection module. Experimental results on five reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our method enhances LLM reasoning performance through supervised, parameter-efficient fine-tuning.

In this dissertation we report results of our research on dense distributed representations of text data. We propose two novel neural models for learning such representations. The first model learns representations at the document level, while the second model learns word-level representations. For document-level representations we propose Binary Paragraph Vector: a neural network models for learning binary representations of text documents, which can be used for fast document retrieval. We provide a thorough evaluation of these models and demonstrate that they outperform the seminal method in the field in the information retrieval task. We also report strong results in transfer learning settings, where our models are trained on a generic text corpus and then used to infer codes for documents from a domain-specific dataset. In contrast to previously proposed approaches, Binary Paragraph Vector models learn embeddings directly from raw text data. For word-level representations we propose Disambiguated Skip-gram: a neural network model for learning multi-sense word embeddings. Representations learned by this model can be used in downstream tasks, like part-of-speech tagging or identification of semantic relations. In the word sense induction task Disambiguated Skip-gram outperforms state-of-the-art models on three out of four benchmarks datasets. Our model has an elegant probabilistic interpretation. Furthermore, unlike previous models of this kind, it is differentiable with respect to all its parameters and can be trained with backpropagation. In addition to quantitative results, we present qualitative evaluation of Disambiguated Skip-gram, including two-dimensional visualisations of selected word-sense embeddings.

With hundreds of thousands of language models available on Huggingface today, efficiently evaluating and utilizing these models across various downstream, tasks has become increasingly critical. Many existing methods repeatedly learn task-specific representations of Large Language Models (LLMs), which leads to inefficiencies in both time and computational resources. To address this, we propose EmbedLLM, a framework designed to learn compact vector representations, of LLMs that facilitate downstream applications involving many models, such as model routing. We introduce an encoder-decoder approach for learning such embeddings, along with a systematic framework to evaluate their effectiveness. Empirical results show that EmbedLLM outperforms prior methods in model routing both in accuracy and latency. Additionally, we demonstrate that our method can forecast a model's performance on multiple benchmarks, without incurring additional inference cost. Extensive probing experiments validate that the learned embeddings capture key model characteristics, e.g. whether the model is specialized for coding tasks, even without being explicitly trained on them. We open source our dataset, code and embedder to facilitate further research and application.

We present a framework where neural models develop an AI Mother Tongue, a native symbolic language that simultaneously supports intuitive reasoning, compositional symbol chains, and inherent interpretability. Unlike post-hoc explanation methods, our approach embeds reasoning directly into the model's representations: symbols capture meaningful semantic patterns, chains trace decision paths, and gated induction mechanisms guide selective focus, yielding transparent yet flexible reasoning. We introduce complementary training objectives to enhance symbol purity and decision sparsity, and employ a sequential specialization strategy to first build broad symbolic competence and then refine intuitive judgments. Experiments on AI tasks demonstrate competitive accuracy alongside verifiable reasoning traces, showing that AI Mother Tongue can serve as a unified mechanism for interpretability, intuition, and symbolic reasoning in neural models.

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 describe a new class of learning models called memory networks. Memory networks reason with inference components combined with a long-term memory component; they learn how to use these jointly. The long-term memory can be read and written to, with the goal of using it for prediction. We investigate these models in the context of question answering (QA) where the long-term memory effectively acts as a (dynamic) knowledge base, and the output is a textual response. We evaluate them on a large-scale QA task, and a smaller, but more complex, toy task generated from a simulated world. In the latter, we show the reasoning power of such models by chaining multiple supporting sentences to answer questions that require understanding the intension of verbs.

We introduce the first method for translating text embeddings from one vector space to another without any paired data, encoders, or predefined sets of matches. Our unsupervised approach translates any embedding to and from a universal latent representation (i.e., a universal semantic structure conjectured by the Platonic Representation Hypothesis). Our translations achieve high cosine similarity across model pairs with different architectures, parameter counts, and training datasets. The ability to translate unknown embeddings into a different space while preserving their geometry has serious implications for the security of vector databases. An adversary with access only to embedding vectors can extract sensitive information about the underlying documents, sufficient for classification and attribute inference.

Sentence embeddings are an important component of many natural language processing (NLP) systems. Like word embeddings, sentence embeddings are typically learned on large text corpora and then transferred to various downstream tasks, such as clustering and retrieval. Unlike word embeddings, the highest performing solutions for learning sentence embeddings require labelled data, limiting their usefulness to languages and domains where labelled data is abundant. In this paper, we present DeCLUTR: Deep Contrastive Learning for Unsupervised Textual Representations. Inspired by recent advances in deep metric learning (DML), we carefully design a self-supervised objective for learning universal sentence embeddings that does not require labelled training data. When used to extend the pretraining of transformer-based language models, our approach closes the performance gap between unsupervised and supervised pretraining for universal sentence encoders. Importantly, our experiments suggest that the quality of the learned embeddings scale with both the number of trainable parameters and the amount of unlabelled training data. Our code and pretrained models are publicly available and can be easily adapted to new domains or used to embed unseen text.

We introduce the use of Poincar\'e embeddings to improve existing state-of-the-art approaches to domain-specific taxonomy induction from text as a signal for both relocating wrong hyponym terms within a (pre-induced) taxonomy as well as for attaching disconnected terms in a taxonomy. This method substantially improves previous state-of-the-art results on the SemEval-2016 Task 13 on taxonomy extraction. We demonstrate the superiority of Poincar\'e embeddings over distributional semantic representations, supporting the hypothesis that they can better capture hierarchical lexical-semantic relationships than embeddings in the Euclidean space.

Neural document retrieval often treats a corpus as a flat cloud of vectors scored at a single granularity, leaving corpus structure underused and explanations opaque. We use Cobweb--a hierarchy-aware framework--to organize sentence embeddings into a prototype tree and rank documents via coarse-to-fine traversal. Internal nodes act as concept prototypes, providing multi-granular relevance signals and a transparent rationale through retrieval paths. We instantiate two inference approaches: a generalized best-first search and a lightweight path-sum ranker. We evaluate our approaches on MS MARCO and QQP with encoder (e.g., BERT/T5) and decoder (GPT-2) representations. Our results show that our retrieval approaches match the dot product search on strong encoder embeddings while remaining robust when kNN degrades: with GPT-2 vectors, dot product performance collapses whereas our approaches still retrieve relevant results. Overall, our experiments suggest that Cobweb provides competitive effectiveness, improved robustness to embedding quality, scalability, and interpretable retrieval via hierarchical prototypes.

There have been many successful applications of sentence embedding methods. However, it has not been well understood what properties are captured in the resulting sentence embeddings depending on the supervision signals. In this paper, we focus on two types of sentence embedding methods with similar architectures and tasks: one fine-tunes pre-trained language models on the natural language inference task, and the other fine-tunes pre-trained language models on word prediction task from its definition sentence, and investigate their properties. Specifically, we compare their performances on semantic textual similarity (STS) tasks using STS datasets partitioned from two perspectives: 1) sentence source and 2) superficial similarity of the sentence pairs, and compare their performances on the downstream and probing tasks. Furthermore, we attempt to combine the two methods and demonstrate that combining the two methods yields substantially better performance than the respective methods on unsupervised STS tasks and downstream tasks.

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.