# Temporal Reasoning Is Not the Bottleneck: A Probabilistic Inconsistency Framework for Neuro-Symbolic QA

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.04243 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.04243/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 50 of its 86 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 May 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-benchmarks-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 50)

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- [What Uncertainties Do We Need in Bayesian Deep Learning for Computer Vision?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.04977/) (2017)
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- [Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.12837/) (2022)
- [Solving Quantitative Reasoning Problems with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.14858/) (2022)
- [Can You Trust Your Model's Uncertainty? Evaluating Predictive Uncertainty Under Dataset Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1906.02530/) (2019)
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- [Geometric Deep Learning: Grids, Groups, Graphs, Geodesics, and Gauges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.13478/) (2021)
- [Large Language Models Cannot Self-Correct Reasoning Yet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01798/) (2023)
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## Abstract (arXiv)

Despite significant advances, large language models (LLMs) continue to exhibit brittle performance on complex temporal reasoning tasks. This failure mode is widely attributed to inherent deficits in autoregressive logical deduction. In this paper, we challenge this prevailing narrative, demonstrating that temporal reasoning is not the fundamental bottleneck; rather, the locus of failure lies in unstructured text-to-event representation. We introduce a novel neuro-symbolic question-answering framework governed by a Probabilistic Inconsistency Signal (PIS) that explicitly isolates perceptual errors from reasoning failures. By lifting unstructured text into explicit event graphs and interval constraints, our architecture strictly decouples semantic extraction from a symbolic reasoning engine. To robustly detect structural breaks, the PIS elegantly unifies symbolic credal intervals with epistemic neural uncertainty extracted via Evidential Deep Learning on LLM hidden states. Empirical evaluations reveal a striking paradigm shift: when provided with correct structural representations, our system's explicit proof traces achieve perfect 1.0 accuracy (4000/4000) and strictly zero false positives/negatives on temporal arithmetic benchmarks. On broader, noise-injected QA settings, the framework maintains a competitive 75.1% accuracy while enabling deterministic, step-level failure localization. Ultimately, by isolating the representation bottleneck from the reasoning substrate, this work reframes temporal QA from an algorithmic reasoning challenge to a structural alignment problem, charting a verifiable path forward for reliable neuro-symbolic AI.