# Targeted Tests for LLM Reasoning: An Audit-Constrained Protocol

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.11599 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.11599/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 8 of its 12 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 12 May 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/prompting-and-chain-of-thought-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [Calibrate Before Use: Improving Few-Shot Performance of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.09690/) (2021)
- [Red Teaming Language Models with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.03286/) (2022)
- [Beyond Accuracy: Behavioral Testing of NLP models with CheckList](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.04118/) (2020)
- [Universal Adversarial Triggers for Attacking and Analyzing NLP](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.07125/) (2019)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [ChartBmkAgent: Harness-Governed Multi-Agent Construction of Chart QA Benchmarks from Sparse Error-Taxonomy Specifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.08106/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Fixed reasoning benchmarks evaluate canonical prompts, but semantically valid changes in presentation can still change model behavior. Studies of prompt variation can reveal such failures, but without audit they can mix genuine model errors with invalid perturbations, extraction artifacts, and unmatched search procedures. We propose an audit-constrained protocol for targeted reasoning evaluation. Prompt variants are generated from a finite component grammar, rendered deterministically, evaluated under a fixed query budget, and counted as model errors only after semantic and extraction audit. Within this protocol we instantiate Component-Adaptive Prompt Sampling (CAPS), a score-based sampler over prompt components, and compare it with equal-budget uniform component sampling under the same task bank, renderer, model interface, decoding settings, and audit procedure. Across three audited slices, the protocol identifies confirmed model-error prompt keys while excluding formatting and extraction artifacts, but matched comparisons do not show that CAPS improves audited yield or unique prompt-key discovery over uniform sampling. The contribution is methodological: targeted prompt variation can be studied under a reconstructable, reviewable, budget-matched protocol, and proxy-guided policies should be judged by audited yield rather than raw mismatch counts or selected examples alone.