22 accepted papers
Incorporating explicit reasoning rules within the latent space of language models (LMs) offers a promising pathway to enhance generalisation, interpretability, and controllability. While current Transformer-based language models have shown strong performance on Natural Language Inference (NLI) tasks
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit reasoning biases, often conflating content plausibility with formal logical validity. This can lead to wrong inferences in critical domains, where plausible arguments are incorrectly deemed logically valid or vice versa. This paper investigates how content biases
Thanks to their linguistic capabilities, LLMs offer an opportunity to bridge the gap between informal mathematics and formal languages through autoformalization. However, it is still unclear how well LLMs generalize to sophisticated and naturally occurring mathematical statements. To address this ga
This paper investigates how hallucination rates in Large Language Models (LLMs) may be controlled via a symbolic data generation framework, exploring a fundamental relationship between the rate of certain mathematical errors and types of input intervention. Specifically, we systematically generate d…
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) have emerged as a critical mechanism in contemporary NLP to support Large Language Models (LLMs) in systematically accessing richer factual context. However, the integration of RAG mechanisms bring its inherent challenges, as LLMs need to integrate potentially no…
Large language models (LLMs) have shown strong performance in many reasoning benchmarks. However, recent studies have pointed to memorization, rather than generalization, as one of the leading causes for such performance. LLMs, in fact, are susceptible to content variations, demonstrating a lack of
Natural language explanations play a fundamental role in Natural Language Inference (NLI) by revealing how premises logically entail hypotheses. Recent work has shown that the interaction of large language models (LLMs) with theorem provers (TPs) can help verify and improve the validity of NLI expla…
Chain-of-Though (CoT) represents a common strategy for reasoning in Large Language Models (LLMs) by decomposing complex tasks into intermediate inference steps. However, explanations generated via CoT are susceptible to content biases that negatively affect their robustness and faithfulness. To miti…
Recent studies on reasoning in language models (LMs) have sparked a debate on whether they can learn systematic inferential principles or merely exploit superficial patterns in the training data. To understand and uncover the mechanisms adopted for formal reasoning in LMs, this paper presents a mech…
Syllogistic reasoning is crucial for Natural Language Inference (NLI). This capability is particularly significant in specialized domains such as biomedicine, where it can support automatic evidence interpretation and scientific discovery. This paper presents SylloBio-NLI, a novel framework that lev…
Transformer models have achieved remarkable performance in many formal reasoning tasks. Nonetheless, the extent of their comprehension pertaining to logical semantics and rules of inference remains somewhat uncertain. Evaluating such understanding necessitates a rigorous examination of these models’…
Integer Linear Programming (ILP) has been proposed as a formalism for encoding precise structural and semantic constraints for Natural Language Inference (NLI). However, traditional ILP frameworks are non-differentiable, posing critical challenges for the integration of continuous language represent…
This paper proposes a methodology for generating and perturbing detailed derivations of equations at scale, aided by a symbolic engine, to evaluate the generalisability of Transformers to out-of-distribution mathematical reasoning problems. Instantiating the framework in the context of sequence clas…
Rigorous evaluation of the causal effects of semantic features on language model predictions can be hard to achieve for natural language reasoning problems. However, this is such a desirable form of analysis from both an interpretability and model evaluation perspective, that it is valuable to inves…
The injection of syntactic information in Variational AutoEncoders (VAEs) can result in an overall improvement of performances and generalisation. An effective strategy to achieve such a goal is to separate the encoding of distributional semantic features and syntactic structures into heterogeneous…
While Large Language Models (LLMs) have found success in real-world applications, their underlying explanatory process is still poorly understood. This paper proposes IBE-Eval, a framework inspired by philosophical accounts on Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) to advance the interpretation and…
This paper investigates the possibility of approximating multiple mathematical operations in latent space for expression derivation. To this end, we introduce different multi-operational representation paradigms, modelling mathematical operations as explicit geometric transformations. By leveraging…
Natural language explanations represent a proxy for evaluating explanation-based and multi-step Natural Language Inference (NLI) models. However, assessing the validity of explanations for NLI is challenging as it typically involves the crowd-sourcing of apposite datasets, a process that is time-con…
How can we interpret and retrieve medical evidence to support clinical decisions? Clinical trial reports (CTR) amassed over the years contain indispensable information for the development of personalized medicine. However, it is practically infeasible to manually inspect over 400,000+ clinical trial…
Most of the contemporary approaches for multi-hop Natural Language Inference (NLI) construct explanations considering each test case in isolation. However, this paradigm is known to suffer from semantic drift, a phenomenon that causes the construction of spurious explanations leading to wrong conclu…
Regenerating natural language explanations in the scientific domain has been proposed as a benchmark to evaluate complex multi-hop and explainable inference. In this context, large language models can achieve state-of-the-art performance when employed as cross-encoder architectures and fine-tuned on…
The application of Natural Language Inference (NLI) methods over large textual corpora can facilitate scientific discovery, reducing the gap between current research and the available large-scale scientific knowledge. However, contemporary NLI models are still limited in interpreting mathematical kn…