Jul 2026· Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval· 0 citations· 42 references
Computer Science
TL;DR
MulTR, a comprehensive benchmark designed for multi-answer temporal reasoning from long unstructured contexts, is introduced, designed to systematically decouple temporal reasoning capabilities from the uncertainty of the number of answers.
Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable success in temporal reasoning. However, existing benchmarks predominantly adopt a "single-answer" paradigm, focusing on verifying the existence of a specific fact while overlooking the challenge of exhaustiveness. In real-world scenarios, entities often simultaneously play multiple roles or exist in multiple states within the same timeframe. To bridge this gap, we introduce MulTR, a comprehensive benchmark designed for multi-answer temporal reasoning from long unstructured contexts. Specifically, MulTR integrates structured temporal facts from Wikidata and natural language text from Wikipedia MulTR integrates structured temporal facts from Wikidata and natural language text from Wikipedia through a logic-driven synthesis process. Notably, we formulate two distinct settings, question-dependent and document-dependent, based on the presence of cue words in the question. It is designed to systematically decouple temporal reasoning capabilities from the uncertainty of the number of answers. Experiment results demonstrate that state-of-the-art models suffer from retrieval laziness, terminating the search process prematurely after locating the first valid piece of evidence. Consequently, their performance drops sharply when evaluated on strict exact match metrics. MulTR, as a diagnostic testing platform, reveal these defects and establish the rigorous standard for future research in dynamic knowledge processing. The MulTR benchmark and evaluation prompt are publicly available at https://github.com/TemporalNLP/MulTR.
PredicateLongBench is proposed, a benchmark that stress-tests long-context reasoning by asking models to identify the longest contiguous subsequence of words in a long input that satisfies given predicates/constraints drawn from a broader predicate class.
Despite the success of Large Language Models (LLMs) on reasoning benchmarks, it remains unclear whether their performance stems from genuine logical deduction or the memorization of training patterns. Existing benchmarks often fail to disentangle reasoning from prior knowledge, as tasks grounded in real-world facts allow models to take ''knowledge shortcuts''. In this paper, we propose a novel diagnostic benchmark to decouple knowledge memorization from logical reasoning. Built on the DBpedia KG, our framework constructs multi-hop reasoning chains (from Q1 to Q5) across three task dimensions: Factural Questions (FQ), Counterfactual Questions (CQ) with logically consistent but counterfactual conclusions, and Questions with Similar-Entity Options (SO) to evaluate the dependence on prior knowledge. Questions without Context serve only as an intermediate form: they contain solely queries with no triples or options, so LLMs cannot answer them directly. Our core hypothesis is that genuine reasoning is demonstrated only when a model follows logical rules despite conflicting prior knowledge. Evaluating seven state-of-the-art LLMs (8B to ultra-large) reveals strong prior knowledge dependence, with performance degrading sharply on counterfactual tasks as reasoning depth grows. This work delineates LLM reasoning boundaries and presents a new paradigm for fine-grained capability assessment.
Fangfei Yan, Jianbo Yao, Michael K. Chen et al.· Proceedings of the 32nd ACM...· 1 citation
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable proficiency in natural language understanding, yet they struggle with strict multi-step reasoning, frequently suffering from hallucinations and inconsistency. Existing solutions like Chain-of-Thought (CoT) lack rigorous verification mechanisms, while standard Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) often misses the complex, structural dependencies inherent in logical tasks. To bridge this gap, we propose a Neuro-Symbolic architecture that integrates a Logical Knowledge Graph (LKG) with dynamic solver routing. Specifically, we introduce an ontology-based LKG that treats logical rules and constraints as first-class topological nodes, enabling explicit modeling of dependencies extracted from text. We further design a Logic Router to dynamically dispatch tasks to the optimal symbolic engine, which is supported by a topology-aware hybrid retrieval mechanism. Experimental results on logical reasoning benchmarks demonstrate that our framework significantly outperforms state-of-the-art prompting and RAG baselines, delivering higher accuracy and verifiable reasoning paths.
Hai-Zhao Fan, Yu-Chi Xiong, Jize Wang et al.· 0 citations
TKFQA, a factuality consistency benchmark comprising 10,130 question-answering (QA) pairs grounded in tables, texts, and knowledge graphs, is introduced and ORLF, an LLM-agnostic training framework that models cross-context topological relations through knowledge-specific latent vectors is proposed.
Shibo Chu, Yuze Liu, Tiehua Zhang et al.· 0 citations
A new benchmark, KIFI, is designed, which comprises 1032 carefully selected instances from the TRUE and ScreenEval datasets, with key information annotated, and it is shown that LLMs frequently fail to use the appropriate information to make correct decisions.
Xindi Guo, Zhen Xie, Patrick H. Chen· Annual International ACM SIG...· 0 citations