提出新框架,让模型在时间推理中实现零错误,关键在精准捕捉事件结构。
Temporal Reasoning Is Not the Bottleneck: A Probabilistic Inconsistency Framework for Neuro-Symbolic QA

- 用概率不一致信号分离感知错误与推理错误,构建显式事件图
- 在正确结构下达到100%准确率(4000/4000),且无误报漏报
- 适合需要可解释、可定位错误的高可靠性推理系统
尽管大语言模型在复杂时间推理任务上仍有脆弱表现,传统观点认为这是自回归逻辑推导的固有缺陷。本文挑战这一认知,指出真正瓶颈在于非结构化文本到事件的表征问题。提出一种基于概率不一致信号(PIS)的神经符号问答框架,将非结构化文本转化为显式事件图与区间约束,严格解耦语义提取与符号推理。通过融合符号置信区间与从语言模型隐藏状态中提取的证据深度学习不确定性,实现对结构断裂的鲁棒检测。实证表明:当提供正确结构表示时,系统在时间算术基准上实现1.0的准确率(4000/4000),且无误报或漏报;在含噪声的通用问答场景中仍保持75.1%准确率,并支持确定性的逐步错误定位。该工作将时间问答从算法推理难题重构为结构对齐问题,为可靠神经符号人工智能提供了可验证路径。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Despite significant advances, large language models (LLMs) continue to exhibit brittle performance on complex temporal reasoning tasks. This failure mode is widely attributed to inherent deficits in autoregressive logical deduction. In this paper, we challenge this prevailing narrative, demonstrating that temporal reasoning is not the fundamental bottleneck; rather, the locus of failure lies in unstructured text-to-event representation. We introduce a novel neuro-symbolic question-answering framework governed by a Probabilistic Inconsistency Signal (PIS) that explicitly isolates perceptual errors from reasoning failures. By lifting unstructured text into explicit event graphs and interval constraints, our architecture strictly decouples semantic extraction from a symbolic reasoning engine. To robustly detect structural breaks, the PIS elegantly unifies symbolic credal intervals with epistemic neural uncertainty extracted via Evidential Deep Learning on LLM hidden states. Empirical evaluations reveal a striking paradigm shift: when provided with correct structural representations, our system's explicit proof traces achieve perfect 1.0 accuracy (4000/4000) and strictly zero false positives/negatives on temporal arithmetic benchmarks. On broader, noise-injected QA settings, the framework maintains a competitive 75.1\% accuracy while enabling deterministic, step-level failure localization. Ultimately, by isolating the representation bottleneck from the reasoning substrate, this work reframes temporal QA from an algorithmic reasoning challenge to a structural alignment problem, charting a verifiable path forward for reliable neuro-symbolic AI.
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