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EMNLP Findings2024

Explicit Inductive Inference using Large Language Models

Tianyang Liu, Tianyi Li, Liang Cheng, Mark Steedman

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) are reported to hold undesirable attestation bias on inference tasks: when asked to predict if a premise P entails a hypothesis H, instead of considering H's conditional truthfulness entailed by P , LLMs tend to use the out-of-context truth label of H as a fragile proxy. In this paper, we propose a pipeline that exploits this bias to do explicit inductive inference. Our pipeline uses an LLM to transform a premise into a set of attested alternatives, and then aggregate answers of the derived new entailment inquiries to support the original inference prediction. On a directional predicate entailment benchmark, we demonstrate that by applying this simple pipeline, we can improve the overall performance of LLMs on inference and substantially alleviate the impact of their attestation bias. 1

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Cited by top-tier papers1

  1. A Survey of Inductive Reasoning for Large Language ModelsKedi Chen, Dezhao Ruan, Yuhao Dan, Yaoting Wang et al.ACL 2026 · 5 citations

Builds on8

  1. Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language ModelsXuezhi Wang, Jason Wei, Dale Schuurmans, Quoc V. Le et al.ICLR 2023 · 681 citations
  2. Quantifying Memorization Across Neural Language ModelsNicholas Carlini, Daphne Ippolito, Matthew Jagielski, Katherine Lee et al.ICLR 2023 · 158 citations
  3. Sources of Hallucination by Large Language Models on Inference TasksNick McKenna, Tianyi Li, Liang Cheng, Mohammad Javad Hosseini et al.EMNLP Findings 2023 · 142 citations
  4. Context-faithful Prompting for Large Language ModelsWenxuan Zhou, Sheng Zhang, Hoifung Poon, Muhao ChenEMNLP Findings 2023 · 46 citations
  5. Prompt Consistency for Zero-Shot Task GeneralizationChunting Zhou, Junxian He, Xuezhe Ma, Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick et al.EMNLP Findings 2022 · 41 citations

Related papers

  1. Neutralizing Bias in LLM Reasoning using Entailment GraphsLiang Cheng, Tianyi Li, Zhaowei Wang, Tianyang Liu et al.ACL Findings 2025
  2. Bi-directional Bias Attribution: Debiasing Large Language Models without Modifying PromptsYujie Lin, Kunquan Li, Yixuan Liao, Xiaoxin Chen et al.ICLR 2026 · 6 citations
  3. From Fallback to Frontline: When Can LLMs be Superior Annotators of Human Perspectives?Hasan Amin, Harry Yizhou Tian, Xiaoni Duan, Chien-Ju Ho et al.ACL Findings 2026
  4. Language Models Are Poor Learners of Directional InferenceTianyi Li, Mohammad Javad Hosseini, Sabine Weber, Mark SteedmanEMNLP Findings 2022 · 6 citations
  5. On the Role of Model Prior in Real-World Inductive ReasoningZhuo Liu, Ding Yu, Hangfeng HeEMNLP 2025
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