ReportLogic: Evaluating Logical Quality in Deep Research Reports
Jujia Zhao, Zhaoxin Huan, Zihan Wang, Xiaolu Zhang, Jun Zhou, Suzan Verberne, Zhaochun Ren
Abstract
Users increasingly rely on Large Language Models (LLMs) for Deep Research, using them to synthesize diverse sources into structured reports that support understanding and action. In this context, the practical reliability of such reports hinges on logical quality: whether the report’s claims and arguments are explicitly supported and can be trusted as a basis for downstream use, rather than merely appearing fluent or informative. However, current evaluation frameworks largely overlook this requirement. To bridge this gap, we introduce ReportLogic, a benchmark that quantifies report-level logical quality through a reader-centric lens of auditability. Specifically, ReportLogic adopts a hierarchical taxonomy that evaluates whether readers can (1) trace an on-topic report structure with a unified analytical arc (Macro-Logic), (2) understand the progression with necessary context (Expositional-Logic), and (3) verify conclusions via explicit claim–support (Structural-Logic). Based on this taxonomy, we construct a human-annotated rubric-guided dataset and train an open-source LogicJudge for scalable evaluation. We further evaluate judge robustness via adversarial attacks, showing that off-the-shelf LLM judges are frequently influenced by superficial cues (e.g., verbosity), and reasoning modes can mask broken support relations. Overall, our results provide actionable guidance for building more robust logic evaluators and improving the logical reliability of LLM-generated reports.- Anthology ID:
- 2026.acl-long.384
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- San Diego, California, United States
- Editors:
- Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 8470–8502
- Language:
- URL:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.384/
- DOI:
- Cite (ACL):
- Jujia Zhao, Zhaoxin Huan, Zihan Wang, Xiaolu Zhang, Jun Zhou, Suzan Verberne, and Zhaochun Ren. 2026. ReportLogic: Evaluating Logical Quality in Deep Research Reports. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 8470–8502, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- ReportLogic: Evaluating Logical Quality in Deep Research Reports (Zhao et al., ACL 2026)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.384.pdf