@inproceedings{wu-etal-2026-unlocking,
    title = "Unlocking Human-Like Visible Logic: How Logic Diagrams Boost Logic Reasoning in Large Language Models?",
    author = "Wu, Xin  and
      Bu, Yuqi  and
      Zhao, Mengchen  and
      Huang, Qingbao  and
      Cai, Yi",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1602/",
    pages = "32014--32031",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their remarkable capabilities in natural language understanding and generation. However, these models still struggle with formal logical reasoning, often producing coherent yet invalid conclusions due to limitations in representing boundaries and relational structures through text alone. Human cognition frequently relies on visual representations to clarify logical structures involving category membership, inclusion, and relational hierarchies. Inspired by this, we investigate whether incorporating visual logic diagrams into LLMs' reasoning workflows can enhance their performance on formal logic tasks. We study this question in a controlled setting using syllogistic and conditional reasoning with programmatically generated Venn, Euler, and Linear diagrams. Across three Vision Language Models (VLMs) families, diagrams help in some settings but can also hurt performance, especially on logically invalid cases where models may over-rely on a single static visual instantiation. We therefore present this work as a reproducible evaluation framework and empirical analysis of when logic diagrams help or hinder language-conditioned reasoning."
}