Analogies are quaternary relations of the form "a is to b as c is to d", usually denoted a : b :: c : d. This notion is formalized in particular with the notion of proportional analogy, which imposes some constraints on the valid analogies. Whereas proportional analogies have been studied mostly in symbolic domains and in vector spaces, their use is limited in non-Euclidean spaces. In this paper, we introduce a proportional analogy relation in Riemannian domains, extending the parallelogram rule used for arithmetic analogies in Euclidean spaces. We illustrate the introduced analogy on various manifolds, such as the sphere, shape spaces and manifolds of probability distributions.
Analogies are quaternary relations of the form "A is to B as C is to D". Among the various formalizations of analogical reasoning, proportional analogies provide an important axiomatic framework by characterizing valid analogies through a set of postulates. While proportional analogies have been extensively studied over Boolean, symbolic, and real-valued domains, their extension to probability distributions remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we introduce a notion of proportional analogy for probability distributions based on Bayesian updating. Our approach builds upon the idea that two distributions are related whenever one can be transformed into the other through Bayesian updating induced by a suitable set of observations. We investigate this framework for several standard members of the exponential family and discuss how it naturally extends to arbitrary probability distributions through Gaussian mixture approximations.
Multilingual reasoning evaluation overwhelmingly relies on translating English benchmarks, a practice that introduces linguistic artifacts and fails to test culturally-grounded reasoning. We introduce ADAGE (Analogical Difficulty-by-design Assessment for Grounded Evaluation), a language-agnostic pipeline that combines native-speaker curation with LLM-assisted generation to construct challenging, translation-free benchmarks for abstract analogical reasoning. We validate ADAGE by constructing benchmarks for Arabic, Amharic, and Japanese. Evaluating 14 open-weight models, we find a consistent cultural reasoning gap: models that perform well on English proverb reasoning struggle substantially on all three native benchmarks, with accuracy dropping by 12--52 percentage points relative to English. We release the pipeline, all three benchmarks, and the full evaluation suite.
Analogical proportions link four items a, b, c, d by a relation stating that ``a is to b as c is to d", a, b, c, d being the formal representation of real world entities, ranging from simple numerical values to more complex structures such as profiles. Accordingly, $a, b, c, d$ could be atomic values like Boolean, nominal or numerical values, more generally vectors of such values, or even families of items represented by logical formulas. In this paper, we consider another representation setting, which is the probabilistic one. Precisely, the article proposes a study of {analogical} proportions between probabilities, whether they are simply between probability values, or between distributions (which requires the preservation of their normalization). More particularly, we study the properties of definitions based on arithmetic proportion, or on a combination of the former with geometric proportion, while other options are also discussed. Previous works have shown that when four profiles a, b, c, d, represented as vectors, form analogical proportions componentwise, it is likely that their classes form an analogical proportion also. This is the basis of an analogical proportion-based classification method that can produce accurate predictions. Similarly, in this paper, each profile is associated with a distribution describing the frequencies of the possible values of a discrete attribute of interest. We then discuss and experimentally investigate if the distributions associated to four profiles forming an analogical proportion themselves also form an analogical proportion.
Zilin Xiao, Qi Ma, Chun-cheng Jason Chen +4cs.CL cs.AI
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has become a standard mechanism for grounding language models in external knowledge, yet conventional retrieval based on lexical or semantic similarity is poorly suited for complex reasoning tasks: a semantically similar problem may demand an entirely different solution strategy, while a superficially different problem may share the same underlying reasoning pattern. We propose Retrieval-Augmented Reinforcement Fine-Tuning (RA-RFT), a post-training framework that teaches language models to reason by analogy. RA-RFT uses gold-relevance distillation to train a retriever that ranks contexts by expected reasoning benefit rather than semantic overlap, and then fine-tunes the policy model via reinforcement fine-tuning methods with retrieved analogous demonstrations, so the model learns to leverage reasoning traces under verifiable outcome rewards. We further analyze the diversity of retrieved contexts and find that reasoning-aware retrieval surfaces complementary solution strategies that provide distinct reasoning scaffolds for individual problems. Across challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks, RA-RFT consistently outperforms standard reinforcement fine-tuning methods. For example, it improves AIME 2025 average@32 accuracy by 7.1 and 2.8 points over GRPO for Qwen3-1.7B and Qwen3-4B respectively -- suggesting that reasoning-aware retrieval is a complementary axis of improvement and orthogonal to advances in reward design or training curricula.