Manuel Vargas Guzmán

Manuel Vargas Guzmán, Jakub Szymanik, Maciej Malicki

Despite the remarkable progress in neural models, their ability to generalize, a cornerstone for applications like logical reasoning, remains a critical challenge. We delineate two fundamental aspects of this ability: compositionality, the capacity to abstract atomic logical rules underlying complex inferences, and recursiveness, the aptitude to build intricate representations through iterative application of inference rules. In the literature, these two aspects are often confounded together under the umbrella term of generalization. To sharpen this distinction, we investigated the logical generalization capabilities of pre-trained large language models (LLMs) using the syllogistic fragment as a benchmark for natural language reasoning. Though simple, this fragment provides a foundational yet expressive subset of formal logic that supports controlled evaluation of essential reasoning abilities. Our findings reveal a significant disparity: while LLMs demonstrate reasonable proficiency in recursiveness, they struggle with compositionality. To overcome these limitations and establish a reliable logical prover, we propose a hybrid architecture integrating symbolic reasoning with neural computation. This synergistic interaction enables robust and efficient inference, neural components accelerate processing, while symbolic reasoning ensures completeness. Our experiments show that high efficiency is preserved even with relatively small neural components. As part of our proposed methodology, this analysis gives a rationale and highlights the potential of hybrid models to effectively address key generalization barriers in neural reasoning systems.

Leonardo Bertolazzi, Manuel Vargas Guzmán, Raffaella Bernardi et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated on reasoning tasks, yet their logical abilities remain contested. To address this, we study LLMs' reasoning in a well-defined fragment of logic: syllogistic reasoning. We cast the problem as premise selection and construct controlled datasets to isolate logical competence. Beyond evaluation, an open challenge is enabling LLMs to acquire abstract inference patterns that generalize to novel structures. We propose to apply few-shot meta-learning to this domain, thereby encouraging models to extract rules across tasks rather than memorize patterns within tasks. Although meta-learning has been little explored in the context of logic learnability, our experiments show that it is effective: small models (1.5B-7B) fine-tuned with meta-learning demonstrate strong gains in generalization, with especially pronounced benefits in low-data regimes. These meta-learned models outperform GPT-4o and o3-mini on our syllogistic reasoning task.