Code and reasoning recently exhibit a mutually reinforcing relationship in large language models (LLMs): Code is abstract, modular, highly structured and has strong logic, guiding reasoning in training and inference. While reasoning translates high-level goals into small executable steps, enable more sophisticated code intellignece, solving real-world challenging software development problems. In this study, we examine how code serves as a structured medium for enhancing reasoning - providing verifiable execution paths, enforcing logical decomposition, and enabling runtime validation, and how advances in reasoning have transformed code intelligence from basic completion to sophisticated agent - enabling models to tackle complex software engineering tasks through deliberate planning and systematic debugging. Finally, we identify key challenges and propose future research directions may deepen the synergy, ultimately advancing LLM performance in both complex reasoning and code intelligence.

LLMs are often claimed to be capable of Natural Language Inference (NLI), which is widely regarded as a cornerstone of more complex forms of reasoning. However, recent works show that LLMs still suffer from hallucinations in NLI due to attestation bias, where LLMs overly rely on propositional memory to build shortcuts. To solve the issue, we design an unsupervised framework to construct counterfactual reasoning data and fine-tune LLMs to reduce attestation bias. To measure bias reduction, we build bias-adversarial variants of NLI datasets with randomly replaced predicates in premises while keeping hypotheses unchanged. Extensive evaluations show that our framework can significantly reduce hallucinations from attestation bias. Then, we further evaluate LLMs fine-tuned with our framework on original NLI datasets and their bias-neutralized versions, where original entities are replaced with randomly sampled ones. Extensive results show that our framework consistently improves inferential performance on both original and bias-neutralized NLI datasets.

Large language models (LLMs) offer a novel and convenient avenue for humans to acquire knowledge. However, LLMs are prone to providing “midguy” answers regardless of users’ knowledge background, thereby failing to meet each user’s personalized needs. To tackle the problem, we propose to generate personalized answers with LLMs based on users’ past question-answering records. We dynamically generate and update a user’s domain and global profiles as the user asks questions, and use the latest profile as the context to generate the answer for a newly-asked question. To save tokens, we propose to compress the domain profile into a set of keywords and use the keywords to prompt LLMs. We theoretically analyze the effectiveness of the compression strategy. Experimental results show that our method can generate more personalized answers than comparative methods. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/DaSESmartEdu/PQA.

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) traditionally relies on complex and costly training processes like supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). To address the challenge of achieving alignment without these extensive tuning costs and expensive annotations, we present a novel, tuning-free approach for self-alignment called Dynamic Rewarding with Prompt Optimization (DRPO). Our approach enables self-alignment through a search-based prompt optimization framework, allowing the model to self-improve and generate optimized prompts without additional training or human supervision. The core of DRPO leverages a dynamic rewarding mechanism to identify and rectify model-specific alignment weaknesses, enabling LLMs to adapt quickly to various alignment challenges. Empirical evaluations on eight recent LLMs, including both open- and closed-source, reveal that DRPO significantly enhances alignment performance, enabling base models to outperform their SFT/RLHF-tuned counterparts. Moreover, DRPO’s automatically optimized prompts surpass those curated by human experts, demonstrating its superior alignment capabilities. Our findings envision a highly cost-effective and adaptable solution for future alignment research to be further explored.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are reported to hold undesirable attestation bias on inference tasks: when asked to predict if a premise P entails a hypothesis H, instead of considering H‘s conditional truthfulness entailed by P, LLMs tend to use the out-of-context truth label of H as a fragile proxy. In this paper, we propose a pipeline that exploits this bias to do explicit inductive inference. Our pipeline uses an LLM to transform a premise into a set of attested alternatives, and then aggregate answers of the derived new entailment inquiries to support the original inference prediction. On a directional predicate entailment benchmark, we demonstrate that by applying this simple pipeline, we can improve the overall performance of LLMs on inference and substantially alleviate the impact of their attestation bias.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown to be capable of various tasks, yet their capability in interpreting and reasoning over tabular data remains an underexplored area. In this context, this study investigates from three core perspectives: the robustness of LLMs to structural perturbations in tables, the comparative analysis of textual and symbolic reasoning on tables, and the potential of boosting model performance through the aggregation of multiple reasoning pathways. We discover that structural variance of tables presenting the same content reveals a notable performance decline, particularly in symbolic reasoning tasks. This prompts the proposal of a method for table structure normalization. Moreover, textual reasoning slightly edges out symbolic reasoning, and a detailed error analysis reveals that each exhibits different strengths depending on the specific tasks. Notably, the aggregation of textual and symbolic reasoning pathways, bolstered by a mix self-consistency mechanism, resulted in achieving SOTA performance, with an accuracy of 73.6% on WikiTableQuestions, representing a substantial advancement over previous existing table processing paradigms of LLMs.