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Improving Rule-based Reasoning in LLMs using Neurosymbolic Representations

2025· article· W4416035455 on OpenAlexafffund
Varun Dhanraj, Chris Eliasmith

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Language
FieldComputer Science
TopicLogic, Reasoning, and Knowledge
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Waterloo
FundersAir Force Office of Scientific ResearchNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaCanada Research Chairs
KeywordsRepresentation (politics)Process (computing)Key (lock)Frame (networking)NormativeCase-based reasoning

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Large language models (LLMs) continue to face challenges in reliably solving reasoning tasks, particularly tasks that involve precise rule following, as often found in mathematical reasoning tasks.This paper introduces a novel neurosymbolic method that improves LLM reasoning by encoding hidden states into neurosymbolic vectors, enabling problem-solving within a neurosymbolic vector space.The results are decoded and merged with the original hidden state, significantly boosting the model's performance on numerical reasoning tasks.By offloading computation through neurosymbolic representations, this method enhances efficiency, reliability, and interpretability.Our experimental results demonstrate an average of 88.6% lower cross-entropy loss and 15.4 times more problems correctly solved on a suite of mathematical reasoning tasks compared to chain-of-thought prompting and supervised fine-tuning (LoRA), while not hindering the LLM's performance on other tasks.We make our code available at Neurosymbolic LLM 1 .

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.008
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.006
Threshold uncertainty score0.020

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.008
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0000.001
Scholarly communication0.0020.003
Open science0.0020.002
Research integrity0.0010.002
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.002

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.023
GPT teacher head0.296
Teacher spread0.273 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designSimulation or modeling
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations2
Published2025
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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