Kedi Chen, Dezhao Ruan East China Normal University, Yuhao Dan, Yaoting Wang Fudan University, Siyu Yan, Xuecheng Wu, Yinqi Zhang Xiaohongshu, Qin Chen East China Normal University 等 15 位作者
Reasoning is an important task for large language models (LLMs). Among all the reasoning paradigms, inductive reasoning is one of the basic types, which is characterized by its particular-to-general thinking process and the non-uniqueness of its answers. The inductive mode is crucial for knowledge generalization and aligns better with human cognition, so it is a fundamental mode of learning, hence attracting increasing interest. Despite the importance of inductive reasoning, there is no systematic summary of it. Therefore, this paper presents the first comprehensive survey of inductive reasoning for LLMs. First, methods for improving inductive reasoning are categorized into three main areas: post-training enhancement, test-time exploration, and data augmentation. Then, current benchmarks of inductive reasoning are summarized, and a unified sandbox-based evaluation approach with the observation coverage metric is derived. Finally, we offer some analyses regarding the source of inductive ability and how simple model architectures and data help with inductive tasks, providing a solid foundation for future research.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Yichuan Ma Fudan University, Linyang Li Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Yongkang Chen, Peiji Li, Xiaozhe Li, Qipeng Guo Shanghai AI Laboratory, Dahua Lin The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Kai Chen Shanghai AI Laboratory
As large language models (LLMs) increasingly tackle complex reasoning tasks, test-time scaling has become critical for enhancing capabilities. However, in agentic scenarios with frequent tool calls, the traditional generation-length-based definition breaks down: tool latency decouples inference time from generation length. We propose Timely Machine, redefining test-time as wall-clock time, where models dynamically adjust strategies based on time budgets. We introduce Timely-Eval, a benchmark spanning high-frequency tool calls, low-frequency tool calls, and time-constrained reasoning. By varying tool latency, we find smaller models excel with fast feedback through more interactions, while larger models dominate high-latency settings via superior interaction quality. Moreover, existing models fail to adapt reasoning to time budgets. We propose Timely-RL to address this gap. After cold-start supervised fine-tuning, we use reinforcement learning to enhance temporal planning. Timely-RL improves time budget awareness and consistently boosts performance across Timely-Eval. We hope our work offers a new perspective on test-time scaling for the agentic era.
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cs.CL · cs.AI
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表