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Benjamin Kiesl-Reiter

Publications and source records attributed to Benjamin Kiesl-Reiter.

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A Neurosymbolic Approach to Natural Language Formalization and Verification

Large Language Models perform well at natural language interpretation and reasoning, but their lack of formal correctness guarantees limits their adoption in regulated industries like finance and health-care that operate under strict policies. To address this limitation, we launched Automated Reasoning checks (ARc): a public service that (1) uses LLMs with optional human guidance to formalize natural language policies, allowing fine-grained control of the formalization process, and (2) uses inference-time autoformalization to validate logical correctness of natural language statements against those policies. ARc performs multiple redundant formalization steps at inference time, checking the formalizations for semantic equivalence. Our benchmarks show that ARc exceeds 99% soundness and achieves a near-zero false positive rate in identifying logical validity. Our approach produces auditable artifacts that substantiate the verification outcomes and can be used to improve the original text. ARc is the first commercial offering from a major cloud provider to integrate automated reasoning into a generative AI guardrail.

cs.CL

VeriCoT: Neuro-symbolic Chain-of-Thought Validation via Logical Consistency Checks

LLMs can perform multi-step reasoning through Chain-of-Thought (CoT), but they cannot reliably verify their own logic. Even when they reach correct answers, the underlying reasoning may be flawed, undermining trust in high-stakes scenarios. To mitigate this issue, we introduce VeriCoT, a neuro-symbolic method that extracts and verifies formal logical arguments from CoT reasoning. VeriCoT formalizes each CoT reasoning step into first-order logic and identifies premises that ground the argument in source context, commonsense knowledge, or prior reasoning steps. The symbolic representation enables automated solvers to verify logical validity while the NL premises allow humans and systems to identify ungrounded or fallacious reasoning steps. Experiments on the ProofWriter, LegalBench, and BioASQ datasets show VeriCoT effectively identifies flawed reasoning, and serves as a strong predictor of final answer correctness. We also leverage VeriCoT's verification signal for (1) inference-time self-reflection, (2) supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on VeriCoT-distilled datasets and (3) preference fine-tuning (PFT) with direct preference optimization (DPO) using verification-based pairwise rewards, further improving reasoning validity and accuracy.

cs.AI