NeSTR通过符号与反思结合,让大模型更准地理解时间逻辑。
NeSTR: A Neuro-Symbolic Abductive Framework for Temporal Reasoning in Large Language Models
- 用符号显式编码时间关系,保持逻辑一致
- 零样本测试中显著提升时间推理准确率
- 适合需要精准时序理解的问答任务
大型语言模型在自然语言处理任务中表现卓越,但在复杂时间约束下的时间推理仍面临挑战。现有方法或依赖符号方法显式编码时间结构,或采用多步推反思机制修正错误,但前者未能充分利用模型推理能力,后者缺乏结构化时间表示,易导致不一致或幻觉推理。即使正确的时间上下文存在,模型仍可能误解或误用时间信息。为此,本文提出神经符号时间推理框架NeSTR,融合结构化符号表示与混合反思机制,增强大模型推理的时间敏感性。NeSTR通过符号编码保持显式时间关系,利用验证保证逻辑一致性,并通过归因反射修正错误推理。在多个时间问答基准上的实验表明,NeSTR在零样本条件下表现优异,且无需微调即可持续提升时间推理能力,验证了神经符号融合在增强大模型时间理解方面的优势。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance across a wide range of natural language processing tasks. However, temporal reasoning, particularly under complex temporal constraints, remains a major challenge. To this end, existing approaches have explored symbolic methods, which encode temporal structure explicitly, and reflective mechanisms, which revise reasoning errors through multi-step inference. Nonetheless, symbolic approaches often underutilize the reasoning capabilities of LLMs, while reflective methods typically lack structured temporal representations, which can result in inconsistent or hallucinated reasoning. As a result, even when the correct temporal context is available, LLMs may still misinterpret or misapply time-related information, leading to incomplete or inaccurate answers. To address these limitations, in this work, we propose Neuro-Symbolic Temporal Reasoning (NeSTR), a novel framework that integrates structured symbolic representations with hybrid reflective reasoning to enhance the temporal sensitivity of LLM inference. NeSTR preserves explicit temporal relations through symbolic encoding, enforces logical consistency via verification, and corrects flawed inferences using abductive reflection. Extensive experiments on diverse temporal question answering benchmarks demonstrate that NeSTR achieves superior zero-shot performance and consistently improves temporal reasoning without any fine-tuning, showcasing the advantage of neuro-symbolic integration in enhancing temporal understanding in large language models.
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