Inductive knowledge graph completion (IKGC) aims to predict missing links involving entities unseen during training, requiring models to learn transferable relational and structural patterns. Existing subgraph- and path-based approaches often encode relational paths independently of their surrounding query subgraphs, although the predictive relevance of a path may vary across structural contexts. We propose PEARL, a Path-Entity Aligned Relational Learning framework that models paths as context-conditioned reasoning signals. PEARL constructs a query-specific contextual subgraph from the union of the query entities' neighborhoods and uses a large language model (LLM)-guided retriever to distill semantically relevant paths. It then builds a bipartite interaction graph over paths, contextual entities, and a global subgraph representation, allowing path embeddings to adapt to local and global structural evidence. To suppress noise introduced by the enlarged context, PEARL employs a dual-view contrastive objective that promotes representation consistency under stochastic contextual perturbations. Experiments on WN18RR, FB15k-237, and NELL-995 show that PEARL obtains the best average Hits@10 among the compared IKGC methods on all three benchmarks. Ablation studies, efficiency analyses, and case studies further validate the contributions of contextual subgraph modeling, semantic path retrieval, path-entity interaction, and contrastive regularization.
Tiberiu Musat, Tiago Pimentel, Nicholas Zucchet +1cs.LG cs.AI
We present a theoretical framework to explain the emergence of inductive reasoning abilities in Transformer language models. While previous works on Transformer learning dynamics have so far been mostly tied to specific tasks, we study a generalized class of inductive tasks that unifies several synthetic tasks known in the literature, including in-context n-grams and multi-hop reasoning. In this class, we theoretically prove that the training dynamics of attention models can be confined to a highly interpretable, low-dimensional invariant manifold. On this manifold, the learning dynamics are captured by a handful of interpretable coordinates rather than millions of parameters, making both theoretical and empirical analysis more tractable. Using this framework, we characterize how data statistics govern the competition between in-context and in-weights learning, we study how random initializations determine the `winning' circuit when multiple solutions are possible, and we demonstrate that the coordinate frame associated with the manifold can be used to automatically detect which circuits have been learned in trained models. By casting circuit formation as a low-dimensional dynamical phenomenon, we take a step toward a predictive theory of how Transformers learn.
Self-refinement often fails to strengthen few-shot inductive reasoning in large language models. Prompting a model to explicitly state its inferred rule does little on its own. What actually matters is a structurally enforced isolation between reasoning stages, so that information can only pass between them as a compressed symbolic state. We introduce \textbf{Hourglass reasoning}, which enforces strict context isolation between reasoning stages. The frozen LLM acts as a meta-constructor, building for each task a symbolic encoder--decoder: an Induction module compresses the support examples into a schema $φ$ (encoder) and a transient scaffold $z$; a Deduction module derives rule $T$ (decoder) from these and discards $z$; an Implementer compiles $(φ, T)$ into artifacts; an error-driven Refiner revises $(φ, T)$ and regenerates artifacts from scratch. Only $(φ, T)$ crosses stage boundaries, so all refinement stays anchored to the rule. We evaluate Hourglass across three benchmarks spanning visual abstraction, hardware synthesis, and textual rule induction, using GPT-5.5 and Gemini 3.1 Pro. On ARC-AGI-2, it raises best-of-5 accuracy by up to 14 points over an iterative-refinement baseline. On ChipBench, it nearly doubles Verilog synthesis accuracy with GPT-5.5, from 31\% to 58\%. BBEH-Linguini draws on puzzles from the International Linguistics Olympiad, a setting where prior work has shown that explicit verbalization can hurt performance. Hourglass mitigates this tendency, and on Gemini 3.1 Pro, it reverses the effect entirely. Ablations confirm that these gains come from the isolation between stages and the quality of the initial induction, not from prompt wording or the particular symbolic form used. It is how information flows through the reasoning process, rather than the language used to express it, that drives inductive reasoning in frozen LLMs.
Mayank Kharbanda, Michael Cochez, Rajiv Ratn Shah +1cs.AI cs.IR
Logical Multi-Hop Query Answering over Knowledge Graphs (KGs) can be formulated as querying, with an implicit completeness assumption. Current works mainly focus on Existential First Order Logic (EFO) queries. These EFO queries contain conjunction, disjunction, and negation operators. Most existing works employ transductive reasoning, meaning they are not capable of reasoning over entities unseen during training. In the real world, there is a resource scarcity, and we cannot train a model with all the nodes of a large KG. Hence, we propose InductWave, a wavelet-based inductive embedding method for logical query answering on large KGs. Here, the training graph consists of fewer nodes than the test graph. Our model performs on par with the baseline models while having half the number of message-passing layers. It outperforms all of them in most cases, with 75% of the layers. These fewer resource requirements enable us to evaluate InductWave on massive graphs, such as Wiki-KG. We test our model using extensive experiments across varying train-test graph proportions of the FB15k-(237) dataset, comparing it with the state-of-the-art models. The code and datasets for the model are available at https://github.com/kracr/inductwave/.
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents in scientific tasks. Yet whether these systems can effectively engage in forms of inductive reasoning relevant to scientific discovery remains an open question. In this work, we introduce FALSIFYBENCH, an evaluation framework for hypothesis-driven reasoning inspired by the classic Wason 2-4-6 task, in which agents must discover hidden semantic properties by iteratively proposing examples and receiving feedback. This task captures key elements of scientific reasoning: hypothesis generation, evidence gathering, and belief revision in response to both confirming and disconfirming evidence. Our evaluation of 12 LLMs across model families and scales shows that reasoning models are generally stronger scientific reasoners than instruction-tuned models, although no model comes close to optimal performance. The primary driver of success is the capacity for negative testing: models that actively seek to falsify their hypotheses consistently outperform those that primarily seek confirmation. Moreover, a fine-grained turn-level analysis, neglected in previous work, reveals that failure is tied to identifiable patterns in how models navigate the hypothesis space.