SLR: Automated Synthesis for Scalable Logical Reasoning
Lukas Helff, Ahmad Omar, Felix Friedrich, Antonia Wüst, Hikaru Shindo, Rupert Mitchell, Tim Woydt, Patrick Schramowski, Wolfgang Stammer, Kristian Kersting
Abstract
We introduce SLR, an end-to-end framework for systematic evaluation and training of Large Language Models (LLMs) via Scalable Logical Reasoning. Given a user's task specification, SLR automatically synthesizes (i) an instruction prompt for an inductive reasoning task, (ii) a validation program, executable on model outputs to provide verifiable rewards, and (iii) the latent ground-truth rule. This process is fully automated, scalable, requires no human annotations, and offers precise control over task difficulty. Using SLR, we create SLR-Bench, a benchmark comprising 19k prompts organized into 20 curriculum levels that progressively increase in relational, arithmetic, and recursive complexity. Large-scale evaluation reveals that contemporary LLMs readily produce syntactically valid rules, yet often fail at correct logical inference. Recent reasoning LLMs demonstrate improved performance but incur very high test-time computation, with costs exceeding $300 for just 1,000 prompts. Finally, curriculum learning via SLR doubles Llama-3-8B accuracy on SLR-Bench, achieving parity with Gemini-Flash-Thinking at a fraction of computational cost. Moreover, these reasoning capabilities generalize to a wide range of established benchmarks, underscoring the effectiveness of SLR for downstream reasoning.
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Cited by top-tier papers2
- Synthesizing Visual Concepts as Vision-Language ProgramsAntonia Wüst, Wolfgang Stammer, Hikaru Shindo, Lukas Helff et al.CVPR 2026 · 6 citations
- ActivationReasoning: Logical Reasoning in Latent Activation SpacesLukas Helff, Ruben Härle, Wolfgang Stammer, Felix Friedrich et al.ICLR 2026 · 6 citations
Builds on11
- Measuring Massive Multitask Language UnderstandingDan Hendrycks, Collin Burns, Steven Basart, Andy Zou et al.ICLR 2021 · 7,905 citations
- Efficient Memory Management for Large Language Model Serving with PagedAttentionWoosuk Kwon, Zhuohan Li, Siyuan Zhuang, Ying Sheng et al.SOSP 2023 · 1,016 citations
- Enhancing Reasoning Capabilities of LLMs via Principled Synthetic Logic CorpusTerufumi Morishita, Gaku Morio, Atsuki Yamaguchi, Yasuhiro SogawaNeurIPS 2024 · 60 citations
- SynLogic: Synthesizing Verifiable Reasoning Data at Scale for Learning Logical Reasoning and BeyondJunteng Liu, Yuanxiang Fan, Zhuo Jiang, Han Ding et al.NeurIPS 2025 · 49 citations
- Language Models Are Greedy Reasoners: A Systematic Formal Analysis of Chain-of-ThoughtAbulhair Saparov, He HeICLR 2023 · 38 citations
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