TurnaboutLLM: A Deductive Reasoning Benchmark from Detective Games

Yuan Yuan, Muyu He, Muhammad Adil Shahid, Ziyang Li, Jiani Huang, Li Zhang


Abstract
This paper introduces TurnaboutLLM, a novel framework and dataset for evaluating the deductive reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by leveraging the interactive gameplay of detective games Ace Attorney and Danganronpa. The framework tasks LLMs with identifying contradictions between testimonies and evidences within long narrative contexts, a challenging task due to the large answer space and diverse reasoning types presented by its questions. We evaluate twelve state-of-the-art LLMs on the dataset, hinting at limitations of popular strategies for enhancing deductive reasoning such as extensive thinking and Chain-of-Thought prompting. The results also suggest varying effects of context size, reasoning steps and answer space size on model performance. Overall, TurnaboutLLM presents a substantial challenge for LLMs’ deductive reasoning abilities in complex, narrative-rich environments.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.101
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1951–1965
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.101/
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Cite (ACL):
Yuan Yuan, Muyu He, Muhammad Adil Shahid, Ziyang Li, Jiani Huang, and Li Zhang. 2025. TurnaboutLLM: A Deductive Reasoning Benchmark from Detective Games. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 1951–1965, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
TurnaboutLLM: A Deductive Reasoning Benchmark from Detective Games (Yuan et al., EMNLP 2025)
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