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Jan 9

Visual Programmability: A Guide for Code-as-Thought in Chart Understanding

Chart understanding presents a critical test to the reasoning capabilities of Vision-Language Models (VLMs). Prior approaches face critical limitations: some rely on external tools, making them brittle and constrained by a predefined toolkit, while others fine-tune specialist models that often adopt a single reasoning strategy, such as text-based chain-of-thought (CoT). The intermediate steps of text-based reasoning are difficult to verify, which complicates the use of reinforcement-learning signals that reward factual accuracy. To address this, we propose a Code-as-Thought (CaT) approach to represent the visual information of a chart in a verifiable, symbolic format. Our key insight is that this strategy must be adaptive: a fixed, code-only implementation consistently fails on complex charts where symbolic representation is unsuitable. This finding leads us to introduce Visual Programmability: a learnable property that determines if a chart-question pair is better solved with code or direct visual analysis. We implement this concept in an adaptive framework where a VLM learns to choose between the CaT pathway and a direct visual reasoning pathway. The selection policy of the model is trained with reinforcement learning using a novel dual-reward system. This system combines a data-accuracy reward to ground the model in facts and prevent numerical hallucination, with a decision reward that teaches the model when to use each strategy, preventing it from defaulting to a single reasoning mode. Experiments demonstrate strong and robust performance across diverse chart-understanding benchmarks. Our work shows that VLMs can be taught not only to reason but also how to reason, dynamically selecting the optimal reasoning pathway for each task.

  • 9 authors
·
Sep 11, 2025 2

Symbolic Graphics Programming with Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) excel at program synthesis, yet their ability to produce symbolic graphics programs (SGPs) that render into precise visual content remains underexplored. We study symbolic graphics programming, where the goal is to generate an SGP from a natural-language description. This task also serves as a lens into how LLMs understand the visual world by prompting them to generate images rendered from SGPs. Among various SGPs, our paper sticks to scalable vector graphics (SVGs). We begin by examining the extent to which LLMs can generate SGPs. To this end, we introduce SGP-GenBench, a comprehensive benchmark covering object fidelity, scene fidelity, and compositionality (attribute binding, spatial relations, numeracy). On SGP-GenBench, we discover that frontier proprietary models substantially outperform open-source models, and performance correlates well with general coding capabilities. Motivated by this gap, we aim to improve LLMs' ability to generate SGPs. We propose a reinforcement learning (RL) with verifiable rewards approach, where a format-validity gate ensures renderable SVG, and a cross-modal reward aligns text and the rendered image via strong vision encoders (e.g., SigLIP for text-image and DINO for image-image). Applied to Qwen-2.5-7B, our method substantially improves SVG generation quality and semantics, achieving performance on par with frontier systems. We further analyze training dynamics, showing that RL induces (i) finer decomposition of objects into controllable primitives and (ii) contextual details that improve scene coherence. Our results demonstrate that symbolic graphics programming offers a precise and interpretable lens on cross-modal grounding.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 5, 2025 7

Orthogonal Matrices for MBAT Vector Symbolic Architectures, and a "Soft" VSA Representation for JSON

Vector Symbolic Architectures (VSAs) give a way to represent a complex object as a single fixed-length vector, so that similar objects have similar vector representations. These vector representations then become easy to use for machine learning or nearest-neighbor search. We review a previously proposed VSA method, MBAT (Matrix Binding of Additive Terms), which uses multiplication by random matrices for binding related terms. However, multiplying by such matrices introduces instabilities which can harm performance. Making the random matrices be orthogonal matrices provably fixes this problem. With respect to larger scale applications, we see how to apply MBAT vector representations for any data expressed in JSON. JSON is used in numerous programming languages to express complex data, but its native format appears highly unsuited for machine learning. Expressing JSON as a fixed-length vector makes it readily usable for machine learning and nearest-neighbor search. Creating such JSON vectors also shows that a VSA needs to employ binding operations that are non-commutative. VSAs are now ready to try with full-scale practical applications, including healthcare, pharmaceuticals, and genomics. Keywords: MBAT (Matrix Binding of Additive Terms), VSA (Vector Symbolic Architecture), HDC (Hyperdimensional Computing), Distributed Representations, Binding, Orthogonal Matrices, Recurrent Connections, Machine Learning, Search, JSON, VSA Applications

  • 1 authors
·
Feb 8, 2022

Natural Language Processing Methods for Symbolic Music Generation and Information Retrieval: a Survey

Several adaptations of Transformers models have been developed in various domains since its breakthrough in Natural Language Processing (NLP). This trend has spread into the field of Music Information Retrieval (MIR), including studies processing music data. However, the practice of leveraging NLP tools for symbolic music data is not novel in MIR. Music has been frequently compared to language, as they share several similarities, including sequential representations of text and music. These analogies are also reflected through similar tasks in MIR and NLP. This survey reviews NLP methods applied to symbolic music generation and information retrieval studies following two axes. We first propose an overview of representations of symbolic music adapted from natural language sequential representations. Such representations are designed by considering the specificities of symbolic music. These representations are then processed by models. Such models, possibly originally developed for text and adapted for symbolic music, are trained on various tasks. We describe these models, in particular deep learning models, through different prisms, highlighting music-specialized mechanisms. We finally present a discussion surrounding the effective use of NLP tools for symbolic music data. This includes technical issues regarding NLP methods and fundamental differences between text and music, which may open several doors for further research into more effectively adapting NLP tools to symbolic MIR.

  • 4 authors
·
Feb 27, 2024

A Neural-Guided Dynamic Symbolic Network for Exploring Mathematical Expressions from Data

Symbolic regression (SR) is a powerful technique for discovering the underlying mathematical expressions from observed data. Inspired by the success of deep learning, recent efforts have focused on two categories for SR methods. One is using a neural network or genetic programming to search the expression tree directly. Although this has shown promising results, the large search space poses difficulties in learning constant factors and processing high-dimensional problems. Another approach is leveraging a transformer-based model training on synthetic data and offers advantages in inference speed. However, this method is limited to fixed small numbers of dimensions and may encounter inference problems when given data is out-of-distribution compared to the synthetic data. In this work, we propose DySymNet, a novel neural-guided Dynamic Symbolic Network for SR. Instead of searching for expressions within a large search space, we explore DySymNet with various structures and optimize them to identify expressions that better-fitting the data. With a topology structure like neural networks, DySymNet not only tackles the challenge of high-dimensional problems but also proves effective in optimizing constants. Based on extensive numerical experiments using low-dimensional public standard benchmarks and the well-known SRBench with more variables, our method achieves state-of-the-art performance in terms of fitting accuracy and robustness to noise.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 24, 2023

MidiCaps -- A large-scale MIDI dataset with text captions

Generative models guided by text prompts are increasingly becoming more popular. However, no text-to-MIDI models currently exist, mostly due to the lack of a captioned MIDI dataset. This work aims to enable research that combines LLMs with symbolic music by presenting the first large-scale MIDI dataset with text captions that is openly available: MidiCaps. MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) files are a widely used format for encoding musical information. Their structured format captures the nuances of musical composition and has practical applications by music producers, composers, musicologists, as well as performers. Inspired by recent advancements in captioning techniques applied to various domains, we present a large-scale curated dataset of over 168k MIDI files accompanied by textual descriptions. Each MIDI caption succinctly describes the musical content, encompassing tempo, chord progression, time signature, instruments present, genre and mood; thereby facilitating multi-modal exploration and analysis. The dataset contains a mix of various genres, styles, and complexities, offering a rich source for training and evaluating models for tasks such as music information retrieval, music understanding and cross-modal translation. We provide detailed statistics about the dataset and have assessed the quality of the captions in an extensive listening study. We anticipate that this resource will stimulate further research in the intersection of music and natural language processing, fostering advancements in both fields.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 4, 2024

The GigaMIDI Dataset with Features for Expressive Music Performance Detection

The Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI), introduced in 1983, revolutionized music production by allowing computers and instruments to communicate efficiently. MIDI files encode musical instructions compactly, facilitating convenient music sharing. They benefit Music Information Retrieval (MIR), aiding in research on music understanding, computational musicology, and generative music. The GigaMIDI dataset contains over 1.4 million unique MIDI files, encompassing 1.8 billion MIDI note events and over 5.3 million MIDI tracks. GigaMIDI is currently the largest collection of symbolic music in MIDI format available for research purposes under fair dealing. Distinguishing between non-expressive and expressive MIDI tracks is challenging, as MIDI files do not inherently make this distinction. To address this issue, we introduce a set of innovative heuristics for detecting expressive music performance. These include the Distinctive Note Velocity Ratio (DNVR) heuristic, which analyzes MIDI note velocity; the Distinctive Note Onset Deviation Ratio (DNODR) heuristic, which examines deviations in note onset times; and the Note Onset Median Metric Level (NOMML) heuristic, which evaluates onset positions relative to metric levels. Our evaluation demonstrates these heuristics effectively differentiate between non-expressive and expressive MIDI tracks. Furthermore, after evaluation, we create the most substantial expressive MIDI dataset, employing our heuristic, NOMML. This curated iteration of GigaMIDI encompasses expressively-performed instrument tracks detected by NOMML, containing all General MIDI instruments, constituting 31% of the GigaMIDI dataset, totalling 1,655,649 tracks.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 24, 2025

Can Large Language Models Understand Symbolic Graphics Programs?

Assessing the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) is often challenging, in part, because it is hard to find tasks to which they have not been exposed during training. We take one step to address this challenge by turning to a new task: focusing on symbolic graphics programs, which are a popular representation for graphics content that procedurally generates visual data. LLMs have shown exciting promise towards program synthesis, but do they understand symbolic graphics programs? Unlike conventional programs, symbolic graphics programs can be translated to graphics content. Here, we characterize an LLM's understanding of symbolic programs in terms of their ability to answer questions related to the graphics content. This task is challenging as the questions are difficult to answer from the symbolic programs alone -- yet, they would be easy to answer from the corresponding graphics content as we verify through a human experiment. To understand symbolic programs, LLMs may need to possess the ability to imagine how the corresponding graphics content would look without directly accessing the rendered visual content. We use this task to evaluate LLMs by creating a large benchmark for the semantic understanding of symbolic graphics programs. This benchmark is built via program-graphics correspondence, hence requiring minimal human efforts. We evaluate current LLMs on our benchmark to elucidate a preliminary assessment of their ability to reason about visual scenes from programs. We find that this task distinguishes existing LLMs and models considered good at reasoning perform better. Lastly, we introduce Symbolic Instruction Tuning (SIT) to improve this ability. Specifically, we query GPT4-o with questions and images generated by symbolic programs. Such data are then used to finetune an LLM. We also find that SIT data can improve the general instruction following ability of LLMs.

  • 10 authors
·
Aug 15, 2024 2

Expanding the Action Space of LLMs to Reason Beyond Language

Large Language Models (LLMs) are powerful reasoners in natural language, but their actions are typically confined to outputting vocabulary tokens. As a result, interactions with external environments -- such as symbolic operators or simulators -- must be expressed through text in predefined formats, parsed, and routed to external interfaces. This overloads the model's language with both reasoning and control duties, and requires a hand-crafted parser, external to the LLM. To address this, we decouple environment interactions from language by internalizing them in an Expanded Action space (ExpA), beyond the vocabulary. The model starts reasoning in the default language environment, but may trigger routing actions and switch to an external environment at any time. From there, the model can only invoke environment-specific actions, receive feedback from the environment, and potentially route back to language as a result. To promote effective exploration of the expanded action space and new environments, we introduce ExpA Reinforcement Learning (EARL) with counterfactual policy optimization. On tasks requiring multi-turn interactions and contingent planning, EARL outperforms strong baselines with vocabulary-constrained actions. It performs robustly across calculator-based multi-task learning and, in the partially observed sorting problem, achieves perfect Sort-4 accuracy while self-discovering an efficient algorithm competitive with classical designs.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 8, 2025 2

Learning to Reason via Mixture-of-Thought for Logical Reasoning

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

  • 5 authors
·
May 21, 2025 7

GRAD: Graph-Retrieved Adaptive Decoding for Hallucination Mitigation

Hallucination mitigation remains a persistent challenge for large language models (LLMs), even as model scales grow. Existing approaches often rely on external knowledge sources, such as structured databases or knowledge graphs, accessed through prompting or retrieval. However, prompt-based grounding is fragile and domain-sensitive, while symbolic knowledge integration incurs heavy retrieval and formatting costs. Motivated by knowledge graphs, we introduce Graph-Retrieved Adaptive Decoding (GRAD), a decoding-time method that grounds generation in corpus-derived evidence without retraining. GRAD constructs a sparse token transition graph by accumulating next-token logits across a small retrieved corpus in a single forward pass. During decoding, graph-retrieved logits are max-normalized and adaptively fused with model logits to favor high-evidence continuations while preserving fluency. Across three models and a range of question-answering benchmarks spanning intrinsic, extrinsic hallucination, and factuality tasks, GRAD consistently surpasses baselines, achieving up to 9.7% higher intrinsic accuracy, 8.6% lower hallucination rates, and 6.9% greater correctness compared to greedy decoding, while attaining the highest truth--informativeness product score among all methods. GRAD offers a lightweight, plug-and-play alternative to contrastive decoding and knowledge graph augmentation, demonstrating that statistical evidence from corpus-level token transitions can effectively steer generation toward more truthful and verifiable outputs.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 5, 2025

Quantifying Language Models' Sensitivity to Spurious Features in Prompt Design or: How I learned to start worrying about prompt formatting

As large language models (LLMs) are adopted as a fundamental component of language technologies, it is crucial to accurately characterize their performance. Because choices in prompt design can strongly influence model behavior, this design process is critical in effectively using any modern pre-trained generative language model. In this work, we focus on LLM sensitivity to a quintessential class of meaning-preserving design choices: prompt formatting. We find that several widely used open-source LLMs are extremely sensitive to subtle changes in prompt formatting in few-shot settings, with performance differences of up to 76 accuracy points when evaluated using LLaMA-2-13B. Sensitivity remains even when increasing model size, the number of few-shot examples, or performing instruction tuning. Our analysis suggests that work evaluating LLMs with prompting-based methods would benefit from reporting a range of performance across plausible prompt formats, instead of the currently-standard practice of reporting performance on a single format. We also show that format performance only weakly correlates between models, which puts into question the methodological validity of comparing models with an arbitrarily chosen, fixed prompt format. To facilitate systematic analysis we propose FormatSpread, an algorithm that rapidly evaluates a sampled set of plausible prompt formats for a given task, and reports the interval of expected performance without accessing model weights. Furthermore, we present a suite of analyses that characterize the nature of this sensitivity, including exploring the influence of particular atomic perturbations and the internal representation of particular formats.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 17, 2023

Evaluating the Symbol Binding Ability of Large Language Models for Multiple-Choice Questions in Vietnamese General Education

In this paper, we evaluate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to perform multiple choice symbol binding (MCSB) for multiple choice question answering (MCQA) tasks in zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot settings. We focus on Vietnamese, with fewer challenging MCQA datasets than in English. The two existing datasets, ViMMRC 1.0 and ViMMRC 2.0, focus on literature. Recent research in Vietnamese natural language processing (NLP) has focused on the Vietnamese National High School Graduation Examination (VNHSGE) from 2019 to 2023 to evaluate ChatGPT. However, these studies have mainly focused on how ChatGPT solves the VNHSGE step by step. We aim to create a novel and high-quality dataset by providing structured guidelines for typing LaTeX formulas for mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology. This dataset can be used to evaluate the MCSB ability of LLMs and smaller language models (LMs) because it is typed in a strict LaTeX style. We focus on predicting the character (A, B, C, or D) that is the most likely answer to a question, given the context of the question. Our evaluation of six well-known LLMs, namely BLOOMZ-7.1B-MT, LLaMA-2-7B, LLaMA-2-70B, GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4.0, on the ViMMRC 1.0 and ViMMRC 2.0 benchmarks and our proposed dataset shows promising results on the MCSB ability of LLMs for Vietnamese. The dataset is available for research purposes only.

  • 2 authors
·
Oct 18, 2023

Struc-Bench: Are Large Language Models Really Good at Generating Complex Structured Data?

Despite the power of Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, they still struggle with tasks that require generating complex, structured outputs. In this study, we assess the capability of Current LLMs in generating complex structured data and propose a structure-aware fine-tuning approach as a solution to improve this ability. To perform a comprehensive evaluation, we propose Struc-Bench, include five representative LLMs (i.e., GPT-NeoX 20B, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Vicuna) and evaluate them on our carefully constructed datasets spanning raw text, HTML, and LaTeX tables. Based on our analysis of current model performance, we identify specific common formatting errors and areas of potential improvement. To address complex formatting requirements, we utilize FormatCoT (Chain-of-Thought) to generate format instructions from target outputs. Our experiments show that our structure-aware fine-tuning method, when applied to LLaMA-7B, significantly improves adherence to natural language constraints, outperforming other evaluated LLMs. Based on these results, we present an ability map of model capabilities from six dimensions (i.e., coverage, formatting, reasoning, comprehension, pragmatics, and hallucination). This map highlights the weaknesses of LLMs in handling complex structured outputs and suggests promising directions for future work. Our code and models can be found at https://github.com/gersteinlab/Struc-Bench.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 16, 2023 1

Beyond Natural Language: LLMs Leveraging Alternative Formats for Enhanced Reasoning and Communication

Natural language (NL) has long been the predominant format for human cognition and communication, and by extension, has been similarly pivotal in the development and application of Large Language Models (LLMs). Yet, besides NL, LLMs have seen various non-NL formats during pre-training, such as code and logical expression. NL's status as the optimal format for LLMs, particularly in single-LLM reasoning and multi-agent communication, has not been thoroughly examined. In this work, we challenge the default use of NL by exploring the utility of non-NL formats in these contexts. We show that allowing LLMs to autonomously select the most suitable format before reasoning or communicating leads to a 3.3 to 5.7\% improvement in reasoning efficiency for different LLMs, and up to a 72.7\% reduction in token usage in multi-agent communication, all while maintaining communicative effectiveness. Our comprehensive analysis further reveals that LLMs can devise a format from limited task instructions and that the devised format is effectively transferable across different LLMs. Intriguingly, the structured communication format decided by LLMs exhibits notable parallels with established agent communication languages, suggesting a natural evolution towards efficient, structured communication in agent communication. Our code is released at https://github.com/thunlp/AutoForm.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 28, 2024

MathBridge: A Large-Scale Dataset for Translating Mathematical Expressions into Formula Images

Understanding sentences that contain mathematical expressions in text form poses significant challenges. To address this, the importance of converting these expressions into formula images has been highlighted. For instance, the expression ``x equals minus b plus or minus the square root of b squared minus four a c, all over two a'' is more readily comprehensible when displayed as an image x = -b pm sqrt{b^2 - 4ac}{2a}. To develop a text-to-image conversion system, we can break down the process into text-to-LaTeX and LaTeX-to-image conversions, with the latter being managed with by existing various LaTeX engines. However, the former approach has been notably hindered by the severe scarcity of text-to-LaTeX paired data, presenting a significant challenge in the field.In this context, we introduce MathBridge, the first extensive dataset for translating mathematical spoken English into LaTeX, which aims to establish a robust baseline for future research in text-to-LaTeX translation. MathBridge comprises approximately 23 million LaTeX formulas paired with corresponding spoken English expressions. Through comprehensive evaluations, including fine-tuning and testing with data, we discovered that MathBridge significantly enhances pre-trained language models' capabilities for text-to-LaTeX translation. Specifically, for the T5-large model, the sacreBLEU score increased from 4.77 to 46.8, demonstrating substantial enhancement. Our findings indicate the necessity for a new metric specifically for text-to-LaTeX conversion evaluation.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 7, 2024

Pre-train, Prompt, and Predict: A Systematic Survey of Prompting Methods in Natural Language Processing

This paper surveys and organizes research works in a new paradigm in natural language processing, which we dub "prompt-based learning". Unlike traditional supervised learning, which trains a model to take in an input x and predict an output y as P(y|x), prompt-based learning is based on language models that model the probability of text directly. To use these models to perform prediction tasks, the original input x is modified using a template into a textual string prompt x' that has some unfilled slots, and then the language model is used to probabilistically fill the unfilled information to obtain a final string x, from which the final output y can be derived. This framework is powerful and attractive for a number of reasons: it allows the language model to be pre-trained on massive amounts of raw text, and by defining a new prompting function the model is able to perform few-shot or even zero-shot learning, adapting to new scenarios with few or no labeled data. In this paper we introduce the basics of this promising paradigm, describe a unified set of mathematical notations that can cover a wide variety of existing work, and organize existing work along several dimensions, e.g.the choice of pre-trained models, prompts, and tuning strategies. To make the field more accessible to interested beginners, we not only make a systematic review of existing works and a highly structured typology of prompt-based concepts, but also release other resources, e.g., a website http://pretrain.nlpedia.ai/ including constantly-updated survey, and paperlist.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 28, 2021

CoEvo: Continual Evolution of Symbolic Solutions Using Large Language Models

Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as transformative tools in artificial intelligence, capable of processing and understanding extensive human knowledge to enhance problem-solving across various domains. This paper explores the potential of LLMs to drive the discovery of symbolic solutions within scientific and engineering disciplines, where such solutions are crucial for advancing theoretical and practical applications. We propose a novel framework that utilizes LLMs in an evolutionary search methodology, augmented by a dynamic knowledge library that integrates and refines insights in an open-ended manner. This approach aims to tackle the dual challenges of efficiently navigating complex symbolic representation spaces and leveraging both existing and newly generated knowledge to foster open-ended innovation. By enabling LLMs to interact with and expand upon a knowledge library, we facilitate the continuous generation of novel solutions in diverse forms such as language, code, and mathematical expressions. Our experimental results demonstrate that this method not only enhances the efficiency of searching for symbolic solutions but also supports the ongoing discovery process, akin to human scientific endeavors. This study represents a first effort in conceptualizing the search for symbolic solutions as a lifelong, iterative process, marking a significant step towards harnessing AI in the perpetual pursuit of scientific and engineering breakthroughs. We have open-sourced our code and data, please visit https://github.com/pgg3/CoEvo for more information.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 25, 2024

Adposition and Case Supersenses v2.6: Guidelines for English

This document offers a detailed linguistic description of SNACS (Semantic Network of Adposition and Case Supersenses; Schneider et al., 2018), an inventory of 52 semantic labels ("supersenses") that characterize the use of adpositions and case markers at a somewhat coarse level of granularity, as demonstrated in the STREUSLE corpus (https://github.com/nert-nlp/streusle/ ; version 4.5 tracks guidelines version 2.6). Though the SNACS inventory aspires to be universal, this document is specific to English; documentation for other languages will be published separately. Version 2 is a revision of the supersense inventory proposed for English by Schneider et al. (2015, 2016) (henceforth "v1"), which in turn was based on previous schemes. The present inventory was developed after extensive review of the v1 corpus annotations for English, plus previously unanalyzed genitive case possessives (Blodgett and Schneider, 2018), as well as consideration of adposition and case phenomena in Hebrew, Hindi, Korean, and German. Hwang et al. (2017) present the theoretical underpinnings of the v2 scheme. Schneider et al. (2018) summarize the scheme, its application to English corpus data, and an automatic disambiguation task. Liu et al. (2021) offer an English Lexical Semantic Recognition tagger that includes SNACS labels in its output. This documentation can also be browsed alongside corpus data on the Xposition website (Gessler et al., 2022): http://www.xposition.org/

  • 11 authors
·
Apr 7, 2017

Empirical analysis of Binding Precedent efficiency in the Brazilian Supreme Court via Similar Case Retrieval

Binding precedents (S\'umulas Vinculantes) constitute a juridical instrument unique to the Brazilian legal system and whose objectives include the protection of the Federal Supreme Court against repetitive demands. Studies of the effectiveness of these instruments in decreasing the Court's exposure to similar cases, however, indicate that they tend to fail in such a direction, with some of the binding precedents seemingly creating new demands. We empirically assess the legal impact of five binding precedents, 11, 14, 17, 26 and 37, at the highest court level through their effects on the legal subjects they address. This analysis is only possible through the comparison of the Court's ruling about the precedents' themes before they are created, which means that these decisions should be detected through techniques of Similar Case Retrieval. The contributions of this article are therefore twofold: on the mathematical side, we compare the uses of different methods of Natural Language Processing -- TF-IDF, LSTM, BERT, and regex -- for Similar Case Retrieval, whereas on the legal side, we contrast the inefficiency of these binding precedents with a set of hypotheses that may justify their repeated usage. We observe that the deep learning models performed significantly worse in the specific Similar Case Retrieval task and that the reasons for binding precedents to fail in responding to repetitive demand are heterogeneous and case-dependent, making it impossible to single out a specific cause.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 9, 2024

High-performance symbolic-numerics via multiple dispatch

As mathematical computing becomes more democratized in high-level languages, high-performance symbolic-numeric systems are necessary for domain scientists and engineers to get the best performance out of their machine without deep knowledge of code optimization. Naturally, users need different term types either to have different algebraic properties for them, or to use efficient data structures. To this end, we developed Symbolics.jl, an extendable symbolic system which uses dynamic multiple dispatch to change behavior depending on the domain needs. In this work we detail an underlying abstract term interface which allows for speed without sacrificing generality. We show that by formalizing a generic API on actions independent of implementation, we can retroactively add optimized data structures to our system without changing the pre-existing term rewriters. We showcase how this can be used to optimize term construction and give a 113x acceleration on general symbolic transformations. Further, we show that such a generic API allows for complementary term-rewriting implementations. We demonstrate the ability to swap between classical term-rewriting simplifiers and e-graph-based term-rewriting simplifiers. We showcase an e-graph ruleset which minimizes the number of CPU cycles during expression evaluation, and demonstrate how it simplifies a real-world reaction-network simulation to halve the runtime. Additionally, we show a reaction-diffusion partial differential equation solver which is able to be automatically converted into symbolic expressions via multiple dispatch tracing, which is subsequently accelerated and parallelized to give a 157x simulation speedup. Together, this presents Symbolics.jl as a next-generation symbolic-numeric computing environment geared towards modeling and simulation.

  • 7 authors
·
May 9, 2021

Mathematical Capabilities of ChatGPT

We investigate the mathematical capabilities of ChatGPT by testing it on publicly available datasets, as well as hand-crafted ones, and measuring its performance against other models trained on a mathematical corpus, such as Minerva. We also test whether ChatGPT can be a useful assistant to professional mathematicians by emulating various use cases that come up in the daily professional activities of mathematicians (question answering, theorem searching). In contrast to formal mathematics, where large databases of formal proofs are available (e.g., the Lean Mathematical Library), current datasets of natural-language mathematics, used to benchmark language models, only cover elementary mathematics. We address this issue by introducing a new dataset: GHOSTS. It is the first natural-language dataset made and curated by working researchers in mathematics that (1) aims to cover graduate-level mathematics and (2) provides a holistic overview of the mathematical capabilities of language models. We benchmark ChatGPT on GHOSTS and evaluate performance against fine-grained criteria. We make this new dataset publicly available to assist a community-driven comparison of ChatGPT with (future) large language models in terms of advanced mathematical comprehension. We conclude that contrary to many positive reports in the media (a potential case of selection bias), ChatGPT's mathematical abilities are significantly below those of an average mathematics graduate student. Our results show that ChatGPT often understands the question but fails to provide correct solutions. Hence, if your goal is to use it to pass a university exam, you would be better off copying from your average peer!

  • 8 authors
·
Jan 31, 2023

Rethinking Symbolic Regression Datasets and Benchmarks for Scientific Discovery

This paper revisits datasets and evaluation criteria for Symbolic Regression, a task of expressing given data using mathematical equations, specifically focused on its potential for scientific discovery. Focused on a set of formulas used in the existing datasets based on Feynman Lectures on Physics, we recreate 120 datasets to discuss the performance of symbolic regression for scientific discovery (SRSD). For each of the 120 SRSD datasets, we carefully review the properties of the formula and its variables to design reasonably realistic sampling range of values so that our new SRSD datasets can be used for evaluating the potential of SRSD such as whether or not an SR method can (re)discover physical laws from such datasets. As an evaluation metric, we also propose to use normalized edit distances between a predicted equation and the ground-truth equation trees. While existing metrics are either binary or errors between the target values and an SR model's predicted values for a given input, normalized edit distances evaluate a sort of similarity between the ground-truth and predicted equation trees. We have conducted experiments on our new SRSD datasets using five state-of-the-art SR methods in SRBench and a simple baseline based on a recent Transformer architecture. The results show that we provide a more realistic performance evaluation and open up a new machine learning-based approach for scientific discovery. Our datasets and code repository are publicly available.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 21, 2022

RSRM: Reinforcement Symbolic Regression Machine

In nature, the behaviors of many complex systems can be described by parsimonious math equations. Automatically distilling these equations from limited data is cast as a symbolic regression process which hitherto remains a grand challenge. Keen efforts in recent years have been placed on tackling this issue and demonstrated success in symbolic regression. However, there still exist bottlenecks that current methods struggle to break when the discrete search space tends toward infinity and especially when the underlying math formula is intricate. To this end, we propose a novel Reinforcement Symbolic Regression Machine (RSRM) that masters the capability of uncovering complex math equations from only scarce data. The RSRM model is composed of three key modules: (1) a Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) agent that explores optimal math expression trees consisting of pre-defined math operators and variables, (2) a Double Q-learning block that helps reduce the feasible search space of MCTS via properly understanding the distribution of reward, and (3) a modulated sub-tree discovery block that heuristically learns and defines new math operators to improve representation ability of math expression trees. Biding of these modules yields the state-of-the-art performance of RSRM in symbolic regression as demonstrated by multiple sets of benchmark examples. The RSRM model shows clear superiority over several representative baseline models.

  • 3 authors
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May 23, 2023

Automated Formalization via Conceptual Retrieval-Augmented LLMs

Interactive theorem provers (ITPs) require manual formalization, which is labor-intensive and demands expert knowledge. While automated formalization offers a potential solution, it faces two major challenges: model hallucination (e.g., undefined predicates, symbol misuse, and version incompatibility) and the semantic gap caused by ambiguous or missing premises in natural language descriptions. To address these issues, we propose CRAMF, a Concept-driven Retrieval-Augmented Mathematical Formalization framework. CRAMF enhances LLM-based autoformalization by retrieving formal definitions of core mathematical concepts, providing contextual grounding during code generation. However, applying retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) in this setting is non-trivial due to the lack of structured knowledge bases, the polymorphic nature of mathematical concepts, and the high precision required in formal retrieval. We introduce a framework for automatically constructing a concept-definition knowledge base from Mathlib4, the standard mathematical library for the Lean 4 theorem prover, indexing over 26,000 formal definitions and 1,000+ core mathematical concepts. To address conceptual polymorphism, we propose contextual query augmentation with domain- and application-level signals. In addition, we design a dual-channel hybrid retrieval strategy with reranking to ensure accurate and relevant definition retrieval. Experiments on miniF2F, ProofNet, and our newly proposed AdvancedMath benchmark show that CRAMF can be seamlessly integrated into LLM-based autoformalizers, yielding consistent improvements in translation accuracy, achieving up to 62.1% and an average of 29.9% relative improvement.

  • 9 authors
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Aug 9, 2025

GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have sparked interest in their formal reasoning capabilities, particularly in mathematics. The GSM8K benchmark is widely used to assess the mathematical reasoning of models on grade-school-level questions. While the performance of LLMs on GSM8K has significantly improved in recent years, it remains unclear whether their mathematical reasoning capabilities have genuinely advanced, raising questions about the reliability of the reported metrics. To address these concerns, we conduct a large-scale study on several SOTA open and closed models. To overcome the limitations of existing evaluations, we introduce GSM-Symbolic, an improved benchmark created from symbolic templates that allow for the generation of a diverse set of questions. GSM-Symbolic enables more controllable evaluations, providing key insights and more reliable metrics for measuring the reasoning capabilities of models.Our findings reveal that LLMs exhibit noticeable variance when responding to different instantiations of the same question. Specifically, the performance of all models declines when only the numerical values in the question are altered in the GSM-Symbolic benchmark. Furthermore, we investigate the fragility of mathematical reasoning in these models and show that their performance significantly deteriorates as the number of clauses in a question increases. We hypothesize that this decline is because current LLMs cannot perform genuine logical reasoning; they replicate reasoning steps from their training data. Adding a single clause that seems relevant to the question causes significant performance drops (up to 65%) across all state-of-the-art models, even though the clause doesn't contribute to the reasoning chain needed for the final answer. Overall, our work offers a more nuanced understanding of LLMs' capabilities and limitations in mathematical reasoning.

  • 6 authors
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Oct 7, 2024 6

Autoregressive Search Engines: Generating Substrings as Document Identifiers

Knowledge-intensive language tasks require NLP systems to both provide the correct answer and retrieve supporting evidence for it in a given corpus. Autoregressive language models are emerging as the de-facto standard for generating answers, with newer and more powerful systems emerging at an astonishing pace. In this paper we argue that all this (and future) progress can be directly applied to the retrieval problem with minimal intervention to the models' architecture. Previous work has explored ways to partition the search space into hierarchical structures and retrieve documents by autoregressively generating their unique identifier. In this work we propose an alternative that doesn't force any structure in the search space: using all ngrams in a passage as its possible identifiers. This setup allows us to use an autoregressive model to generate and score distinctive ngrams, that are then mapped to full passages through an efficient data structure. Empirically, we show this not only outperforms prior autoregressive approaches but also leads to an average improvement of at least 10 points over more established retrieval solutions for passage-level retrieval on the KILT benchmark, establishing new state-of-the-art downstream performance on some datasets, while using a considerably lighter memory footprint than competing systems. Code and pre-trained models at https://github.com/facebookresearch/SEAL.

  • 6 authors
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Apr 22, 2022

Herald: A Natural Language Annotated Lean 4 Dataset

Verifiable formal languages like Lean have profoundly impacted mathematical reasoning, particularly through the use of large language models (LLMs) for automated reasoning. A significant challenge in training LLMs for these formal languages is the lack of parallel datasets that align natural language with formal language proofs. To address this challenge, this paper introduces a novel framework for translating the Mathlib4 corpus (a unified library of mathematics in formal language Lean 4) into natural language. Building upon this, we employ a dual augmentation strategy that combines tactic-based and informal-based approaches, leveraging the Lean-jixia system, a Lean 4 analyzer. We present the results of this pipeline on Mathlib4 as Herald (Hierarchy and Retrieval-based Translated Lean Dataset). We also propose the Herald Translator, which is fine-tuned on Herald. Herald translator achieves a 93.2% accuracy (Pass@128) on formalizing statements in the miniF2F-test and a 22.5% accuracy on our internal graduate-level textbook dataset, outperforming InternLM2-Math-Plus-7B (74.0% and 7.5%) and TheoremLlama (50.1% and 4.0%). Furthermore, we propose a section-level translation framework for real-world applications. As a direct application of Herald translator, we have successfully translated a template section in the Stack project, marking a notable progress in the automatic formalization of graduate-level mathematical literature. Our model, along with the datasets, will be open-sourced to the public soon.

  • 7 authors
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Oct 9, 2024

What's In Your Field? Mapping Scientific Research with Knowledge Graphs and Large Language Models

The scientific literature's exponential growth makes it increasingly challenging to navigate and synthesize knowledge across disciplines. Large language models (LLMs) are powerful tools for understanding scientific text, but they fail to capture detailed relationships across large bodies of work. Unstructured approaches, like retrieval augmented generation, can sift through such corpora to recall relevant facts; however, when millions of facts influence the answer, unstructured approaches become cost prohibitive. Structured representations offer a natural complement -- enabling systematic analysis across the whole corpus. Recent work enhances LLMs with unstructured or semistructured representations of scientific concepts; to complement this, we try extracting structured representations using LLMs. By combining LLMs' semantic understanding with a schema of scientific concepts, we prototype a system that answers precise questions about the literature as a whole. Our schema applies across scientific fields and we extract concepts from it using only 20 manually annotated abstracts. To demonstrate the system, we extract concepts from 30,000 papers on arXiv spanning astrophysics, fluid dynamics, and evolutionary biology. The resulting database highlights emerging trends and, by visualizing the knowledge graph, offers new ways to explore the ever-growing landscape of scientific knowledge. Demo: abby101/surveyor-0 on HF Spaces. Code: https://github.com/chiral-carbon/kg-for-science.

  • 4 authors
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Mar 12, 2025

Extracting Mathematical Concepts with Large Language Models

We extract mathematical concepts from mathematical text using generative large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT, contributing to the field of automatic term extraction (ATE) and mathematical text processing, and also to the study of LLMs themselves. Our work builds on that of others in that we aim for automatic extraction of terms (keywords) in one mathematical field, category theory, using as a corpus the 755 abstracts from a snapshot of the online journal "Theory and Applications of Categories", circa 2020. Where our study diverges from previous work is in (1) providing a more thorough analysis of what makes mathematical term extraction a difficult problem to begin with; (2) paying close attention to inter-annotator disagreements; (3) providing a set of guidelines which both human and machine annotators could use to standardize the extraction process; (4) introducing a new annotation tool to help humans with ATE, applicable to any mathematical field and even beyond mathematics; (5) using prompts to ChatGPT as part of the extraction process, and proposing best practices for such prompts; and (6) raising the question of whether ChatGPT could be used as an annotator on the same level as human experts. Our overall findings are that the matter of mathematical ATE is an interesting field which can benefit from participation by LLMs, but LLMs themselves cannot at this time surpass human performance on it.

  • 4 authors
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Aug 29, 2023

HyDRA: A Hybrid-Driven Reasoning Architecture for Verifiable Knowledge Graphs

The synergy between symbolic knowledge, often represented by Knowledge Graphs (KGs), and the generative capabilities of neural networks is central to advancing neurosymbolic AI. A primary bottleneck in realizing this potential is the difficulty of automating KG construction, which faces challenges related to output reliability, consistency, and verifiability. These issues can manifest as structural inconsistencies within the generated graphs, such as the formation of disconnected isolated islands of data or the inaccurate conflation of abstract classes with specific instances. To address these challenges, we propose HyDRA, a Hybrid-Driven Reasoning Architecture designed for verifiable KG automation. Given a domain or an initial set of documents, HyDRA first constructs an ontology via a panel of collaborative neurosymbolic agents. These agents collaboratively agree on a set of competency questions (CQs) that define the scope and requirements the ontology must be able to answer. Given these CQs, we build an ontology graph that subsequently guides the automated extraction of triplets for KG generation from arbitrary documents. Inspired by design-by-contracts (DbC) principles, our method leverages verifiable contracts as the primary control mechanism to steer the generative process of Large Language Models (LLMs). To verify the output of our approach, we extend beyond standard benchmarks and propose an evaluation framework that assesses the functional correctness of the resulting KG by leveraging symbolic verifications as described by the neurosymbolic AI framework, SymbolicAI. This work contributes a hybrid-driven architecture for improving the reliability of automated KG construction and the exploration of evaluation methods for measuring the functional integrity of its output. The code is publicly available.

  • 5 authors
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Jul 21, 2025

Decomposed Prompting: A Modular Approach for Solving Complex Tasks

Few-shot prompting is a surprisingly powerful way to use Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve various tasks. However, this approach struggles as the task complexity increases or when the individual reasoning steps of the task themselves are hard to learn, especially when embedded in more complex tasks. To address this, we propose Decomposed Prompting, a new approach to solve complex tasks by decomposing them (via prompting) into simpler sub-tasks that can be delegated to a library of prompting-based LLMs dedicated to these sub-tasks. This modular structure allows each prompt to be optimized for its specific sub-task, further decomposed if necessary, and even easily replaced with more effective prompts, trained models, or symbolic functions if desired. We show that the flexibility and modularity of Decomposed Prompting allows it to outperform prior work on few-shot prompting using GPT3. On symbolic reasoning tasks, we can further decompose sub-tasks that are hard for LLMs into even simpler solvable sub-tasks. When the complexity comes from the input length, we can recursively decompose the task into the same task but with smaller inputs. We also evaluate our approach on textual multi-step reasoning tasks: on long-context multi-hop QA task, we can more effectively teach the sub-tasks via our separate sub-tasks prompts; and on open-domain multi-hop QA, we can incorporate a symbolic information retrieval within our decomposition framework, leading to improved performance on both tasks. Datasets, Code and Prompts available at https://github.com/allenai/DecomP.

  • 7 authors
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Oct 5, 2022

MMDocIR: Benchmarking Multi-Modal Retrieval for Long Documents

Multi-modal document retrieval is designed to identify and retrieve various forms of multi-modal content, such as figures, tables, charts, and layout information from extensive documents. Despite its significance, there is a notable lack of a robust benchmark to effectively evaluate the performance of systems in multi-modal document retrieval. To address this gap, this work introduces a new benchmark, named as MMDocIR, encompassing two distinct tasks: page-level and layout-level retrieval. The former focuses on localizing the most relevant pages within a long document, while the latter targets the detection of specific layouts, offering a more fine-grained granularity than whole-page analysis. A layout can refer to a variety of elements such as textual paragraphs, equations, figures, tables, or charts. The MMDocIR benchmark comprises a rich dataset featuring expertly annotated labels for 1,685 questions and bootstrapped labels for 173,843 questions, making it a pivotal resource for advancing multi-modal document retrieval for both training and evaluation. Through rigorous experiments, we reveal that (i) visual retrievers significantly outperform their text counterparts, (ii) MMDocIR train set can effectively benefit the training process of multi-modal document retrieval and (iii) text retrievers leveraging on VLM-text perform much better than those using OCR-text. These findings underscores the potential advantages of integrating visual elements for multi-modal document retrieval.

  • 6 authors
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Jan 15, 2025 2

FLARE: Faithful Logic-Aided Reasoning and Exploration

Modern Question Answering (QA) and Reasoning approaches based on Large Language Models (LLMs) commonly use prompting techniques, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT), assuming the resulting generation will have a more granular exploration and reasoning over the question space and scope. However, such methods struggle with generating outputs that are faithful to the intermediate chain of reasoning produced by the model. On the other end of the spectrum, neuro-symbolic methods such as Faithful CoT (F-CoT) propose to combine LLMs with external symbolic solvers. While such approaches boast a high degree of faithfulness, they usually require a model trained for code generation and struggle with tasks that are ambiguous or hard to formalise strictly. We introduce Faithful Logic-Aided Reasoning and Exploration (\ours), a novel interpretable approach for traversing the problem space using task decompositions. We use the LLM to plan a solution, soft-formalise the query into facts and predicates using a logic programming code and simulate that code execution using an exhaustive multi-hop search over the defined space. Our method allows us to compute the faithfulness of the reasoning process w.r.t. the generated code and analyse the steps of the multi-hop search without relying on external solvers. Our methods achieve SOTA results on 7 out of 9 diverse reasoning benchmarks. We also show that model faithfulness positively correlates with overall performance and further demonstrate that {\ours} allows pinpointing the decisive factors sufficient for and leading to the correct answer with optimal reasoning during the multi-hop search.

  • 5 authors
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Oct 14, 2024 2

Speaking in Words, Thinking in Logic: A Dual-Process Framework in QA Systems

Recent advances in large language models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced question-answering (QA) capabilities, particularly in open-domain contexts. However, in closed-domain scenarios such as education, healthcare, and law, users demand not only accurate answers but also transparent reasoning and explainable decision-making processes. While neural-symbolic (NeSy) frameworks have emerged as a promising solution, leveraging LLMs for natural language understanding and symbolic systems for formal reasoning, existing approaches often rely on large-scale models and exhibit inefficiencies in translating natural language into formal logic representations. To address these limitations, we introduce Text-JEPA (Text-based Joint-Embedding Predictive Architecture), a lightweight yet effective framework for converting natural language into first-order logic (NL2FOL). Drawing inspiration from dual-system cognitive theory, Text-JEPA emulates System 1 by efficiently generating logic representations, while the Z3 solver operates as System 2, enabling robust logical inference. To rigorously evaluate the NL2FOL-to-reasoning pipeline, we propose a comprehensive evaluation framework comprising three custom metrics: conversion score, reasoning score, and Spearman rho score, which collectively capture the quality of logical translation and its downstream impact on reasoning accuracy. Empirical results on domain-specific datasets demonstrate that Text-JEPA achieves competitive performance with significantly lower computational overhead compared to larger LLM-based systems. Our findings highlight the potential of structured, interpretable reasoning frameworks for building efficient and explainable QA systems in specialized domains.

  • 8 authors
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Jul 27, 2025

Surrogate Signals from Format and Length: Reinforcement Learning for Solving Mathematical Problems without Ground Truth Answers

Large Language Models have achieved remarkable success in natural language processing tasks, with Reinforcement Learning playing a key role in adapting them to specific applications. However, obtaining ground truth answers for training LLMs in mathematical problem-solving is often challenging, costly, and sometimes unfeasible. This research delves into the utilization of format and length as surrogate signals to train LLMs for mathematical problem-solving, bypassing the need for traditional ground truth answers.Our study shows that a reward function centered on format correctness alone can yield performance improvements comparable to the standard GRPO algorithm in early phases. Recognizing the limitations of format-only rewards in the later phases, we incorporate length-based rewards. The resulting GRPO approach, leveraging format-length surrogate signals, not only matches but surpasses the performance of the standard GRPO algorithm relying on ground truth answers in certain scenarios, achieving 40.0\% accuracy on AIME2024 with a 7B base model. Through systematic exploration and experimentation, this research not only offers a practical solution for training LLMs to solve mathematical problems and reducing the dependence on extensive ground truth data collection, but also reveals the essence of why our label-free approach succeeds: base model is like an excellent student who has already mastered mathematical and logical reasoning skills, but performs poorly on the test paper, it simply needs to develop good answering habits to achieve outstanding results in exams , in other words, to unlock the capabilities it already possesses.

  • 7 authors
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May 25, 2025 2