{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/can-pretrained-language-models-yet-reason","title":"Can Pretrained Language Models (Yet) Reason Deductively?","arxiv_id":"2210.06442","date":"2022-10-12","proceeding":null,"authors":["Zhangdie Yuan","Songbo Hu","Ivan Vulić","Anna Korhonen","Zaiqiao Meng"],"abstract":"Acquiring factual knowledge with Pretrained Language Models (PLMs) has attracted increasing attention, showing promising performance in many knowledge-intensive tasks. Their good performance has led the community to believe that the models do possess a modicum of reasoning competence rather than merely memorising the knowledge. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the learnable deductive (also known as explicit) reasoning capability of PLMs. Through a series of controlled experiments, we posit two main findings. (i) PLMs inadequately generalise learned logic rules and perform inconsistently against simple adversarial surface form edits. (ii) While the deductive reasoning fine-tuning of PLMs does improve their performance on reasoning over unseen knowledge facts, it results in catastrophically forgetting the previously learnt knowledge. Our main results suggest that PLMs cannot yet perform reliable deductive reasoning, demonstrating the importance of controlled examinations and probing of PLMs' reasoning abilities; we reach beyond (misleading) task performance, revealing that PLMs are still far from human-level reasoning capabilities, even for simple deductive tasks.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.06442v2","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2210.06442v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"can-pretrained-language-models-yet-reason","repo_url":"https://github.com/cambridgeltl/deductive_reasoning_probing","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2210.06442","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2210.06442"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-24T18:15:14+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. Samples come from repositories linked to the paper, official or community; repo_kind says which.","repos":[{"provenance":"external:paperswithcode_snapshot_2025-07-28","url":"https://github.com/cambridgeltl/deductive_reasoning_probing","reach":{"status":"ok","spdx":"MIT"}}],"summary":{"unverified":6},"by_repo_kind":{"official":{"samples":6,"ran":0,"repositories":1}},"repo_kind_vocabulary":{"official":"The archive marks this repository official for the paper","named_in_paper":"The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official","listed":"In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper","found_in_text":"Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted","community":"Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested"},"n_pointer_only_for_licence":0,"samples":[{"code_sha256_prefix":"3cd228d6f6380e1a","entry":"get_entity_mapping","repo":"cambridgeltl/deductive_reasoning_probing","repo_kind":"official","path":"src/probe.py","file_url":"https://github.com/cambridgeltl/deductive_reasoning_probing/blob/HEAD/src/probe.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"3cd228d6f6380e1a"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"8ede69c94d5e4fca","entry":"get_relation_mapping","repo":"cambridgeltl/deductive_reasoning_probing","repo_kind":"official","path":"src/probe.py","file_url":"https://github.com/cambridgeltl/deductive_reasoning_probing/blob/HEAD/src/probe.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"8ede69c94d5e4fca"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"65f9aa843a9ae237","entry":"load_obj","repo":"cambridgeltl/deductive_reasoning_probing","repo_kind":"official","path":"src/probe.py","file_url":"https://github.com/cambridgeltl/deductive_reasoning_probing/blob/HEAD/src/probe.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"65f9aa843a9ae237"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"97faab831f3d1065","entry":"process_chunk_data","repo":"cambridgeltl/deductive_reasoning_probing","repo_kind":"official","path":"src/download_wikipedia.py","file_url":"https://github.com/cambridgeltl/deductive_reasoning_probing/blob/HEAD/src/download_wikipedia.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"97faab831f3d1065"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"2300c86aa6df36b8","entry":"process_eval_data","repo":"cambridgeltl/deductive_reasoning_probing","repo_kind":"official","path":"src/util.py","file_url":"https://github.com/cambridgeltl/deductive_reasoning_probing/blob/HEAD/src/util.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"2300c86aa6df36b8"}},{"code_sha256_prefix":"553e04d1ebfd0daa","entry":"split_into_sentences","repo":"cambridgeltl/deductive_reasoning_probing","repo_kind":"official","path":"src/download_wikipedia.py","file_url":"https://github.com/cambridgeltl/deductive_reasoning_probing/blob/HEAD/src/download_wikipedia.py","link_basis":"harvester_set","language":"python","status":"unverified","verification_level":0,"contract_check":null,"metamorphic_tier":null,"behaviour_fingerprint":false,"licence":"MIT","inline_ok":true,"mcp_get_code":{"code_sha256":"553e04d1ebfd0daa"}}]},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}