Pith. sign in

REVIEW 5 cited by

Understanding and Patching Compositional Reasoning in LLMs

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

arxiv 2402.14328 v2 pith:LDGYFMMN submitted 2024-02-22 cs.CL

classification cs.CL
keywords reasoningcompositionalllmsresultsimplicitcremeempiricalfindings
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
0 comments
read the original abstract

LLMs have marked a revolutonary shift, yet they falter when faced with compositional reasoning tasks. Our research embarks on a quest to uncover the root causes of compositional reasoning failures of LLMs, uncovering that most of them stem from the improperly generated or leveraged implicit reasoning results. Inspired by our empirical findings, we resort to Logit Lens and an intervention experiment to dissect the inner hidden states of LLMs. This deep dive reveals that implicit reasoning results indeed surface within middle layers and play a causative role in shaping the final explicit reasoning results. Our exploration further locates multi-head self-attention (MHSA) modules within these layers, which emerge as the linchpins in accurate generation and leveraing of implicit reasoning results. Grounded on the above findings, we develop CREME, a lightweight method to patch errors in compositional reasoning via editing the located MHSA modules. Our empirical evidence stands testament to CREME's effectiveness, paving the way for autonomously and continuously enhancing compositional reasoning capabilities in language models.

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 5 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. Verbalizable Representations Form a Global Workspace in Language Models

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 7.0 of 10

    Language models represent their current reasoning in a small, readable set of verbalizable vectors (the J-space) that functions like a global workspace.

  2. The Power of Power Law: Asymmetry Enables Compositional Reasoning

    cs.AI 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    Power-law data sampling creates beneficial asymmetry in the loss landscape that lets models acquire high-frequency skill compositions first, enabling more efficient learning of rare long-tail skills than uniform distr...

  3. When LLM Meets Time Series: Can LLMs Perform Multi-Step Time Series Reasoning and Inference

    cs.LG 2025-09 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    TSAIA, a new benchmark, tests eight LLMs on 1,054 multi-step time series tasks and finds they cannot reliably complete the required workflows.

  4. A Survey on Latent Reasoning

    cs.CL 2025-07 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    A survey that organizes latent reasoning methods into vertical recurrence, horizontal recurrence, and infinite-depth diffusion, arguing that silent reasoning can beat explicit chain-of-thought.

  5. CryptoX : Compositional Reasoning Evaluation of Large Language Models

    cs.CR 2025-02 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    A benchmark that encodes prompts in secret codes and measures how much accuracy models lose, showing most LLMs, especially open-source ones, struggle on this two-step compositional task.

Pith tools