# Reason Popper-ly: Patching In-Context Reasoning with Inductive Logic Programming

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.23019 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.23019/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Prompting and chain-of-thought reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 24 of its 30 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jul 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, 24 of 24)

- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Toolformer: Language Models Can Teach Themselves to Use Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.04761/) (2023)
- [Let's Verify Step by Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.20050/) (2023)
- [Self-Refine: Iterative Refinement with Self-Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17651/) (2023)
- [Language Models Don't Always Say What They Think: Unfaithful Explanations in Chain-of-Thought Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.04388/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models Cannot Self-Correct Reasoning Yet](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.01798/) (2023)
- [CRITIC: Large Language Models Can Self-Correct with Tool-Interactive Critiquing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.11738/) (2023)
- [Measuring Faithfulness in Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.13702/) (2023)
- [LeanDojo: Theorem Proving with Retrieval-Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15626/) (2023)
- [Logic-LM: Empowering Large Language Models with Symbolic Solvers for Faithful Logical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.12295/) (2023)
- [Language Models Are Greedy Reasoners: A Systematic Formal Analysis of Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.01240/) (2022)
- [Faithful Chain-of-Thought Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13379/) (2023)
- [LINC: A Neurosymbolic Approach for Logical Reasoning by Combining Language Models with First-Order Logic Provers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.15164/) (2023)
- [CLUTRR: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Inductive Reasoning from Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.06177/) (2019)
- [Faithful Logical Reasoning via Symbolic Chain-of-Thought](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.18357/) (2024)
- [Learning programs by learning from failures](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.02259/) (2020)
- [Empowering LLMs with Logical Reasoning: A Comprehensive Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.15652/) (2025)
- [CitySpec: An Intelligent Assistant System for Requirement Specification in Smart Cities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.03132/) (2022)
- [CitySpec with Shield: A Secure Intelligent Assistant for Requirement Formalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.09665/) (2023)
- [Inductive Learning of Logical Theories with LLMs: An Expressivity-Graded Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.16779/) (2024)
- [Sim911: Towards Effective and Equitable 9-1-1 Dispatcher Training with an LLM-Enabled Simulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.16844/) (2024)
- [LogiDebrief: A Signal-Temporal Logic based Automated Debriefing Approach with Large Language Models Integration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03985/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Chain-of-thought (CoT) prompting enables large language models (LLMs) to tackle multi-step reasoning tasks, yet the generated intermediate steps are not guaranteed to be logically sound. We present Reason Popper-ly, a neurosymbolic framework that uses inductive logic programming (ILP) to learn relation composition rules from reasoning traces and deploys them as an online verifier for step-level correction. Given an LLM-generated trace, the method checks each inferred step against the learned rule table, diagnoses the violation type, rewrites incorrect steps with symbolically derived repairs, and regenerates the remaining suffix so that the model can produce its final answer conditioned on a verified trace. We evaluate on CLUTRR, a multi-hop kinship reasoning benchmark, using five language models over reasoning chains of 2 to 10 hops. Across all models, Reason Popper-ly consistently improves terminal accuracy over standard CoT, with gains of up to 48 percentage points for small models and 15 points for frontier models on the longest chains. Compared with a fully exogenous symbolic pipeline, our method performs better on harder instances by preserving the model's successful grounding while correcting only verifiable reasoning failures. In addition, step-level ILP verification yields a fine-grained error taxonomy that provides diagnostic insight beyond final-answer accuracy.