Evaluating Reasoning Models for Queries with Presuppositions

Rose Sathyanathan, Kinshuk Vasisht, Danish Pruthi


Abstract
Millions of users turn to AI models for their information needs. It is conceivable that a large number of user queries contain assumptions that may be factually inaccurate. Prior work notes that large language models (LLMs) often fail to challenge such erroneous assumptions, and can reinforce users’ misinformed opinions. However, given the recent advances, especially in model’s reasoning capabilities, we revisit whether large reasoning models (LRMs) can reason about the underlying assumptions and respond to user queries appropriately. We construct queries with varying degrees of presuppositions spanning health, science, and general knowledge, and use it to evaluate several widely-deployed models When compared to non-reasoning models, we find that reasoning models achieve a slightly higher accuracy (2-11%), but they still fail to challenge a large fraction (26-42%) of false presuppositions. Further, reasoning models remain susceptible to how strongly the presupposition is expressed.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.1201
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
23991–24006
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.findings-acl.1201/
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Cite (ACL):
Rose Sathyanathan, Kinshuk Vasisht, and Danish Pruthi. 2026. Evaluating Reasoning Models for Queries with Presuppositions. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 23991–24006, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Evaluating Reasoning Models for Queries with Presuppositions (Sathyanathan et al., Findings 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.findings-acl.1201.pdf
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