@inproceedings{he-etal-2025-idea,
    title = "{IDEA}: Enhancing the Rule Learning Ability of Large Language Model Agent through Induction, Deduction, and Abduction",
    author = "He, Kaiyu  and
      Zhang, Mian  and
      Yan, Shuo  and
      Wu, Peilin  and
      Chen, Zhiyu",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/transition-to-people-yaml/2025.findings-acl.698/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-acl.698",
    pages = "13563--13597",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5",
    abstract = "While large language models (LLMs) have been thoroughly evaluated for deductive and inductive reasoning, their proficiency in holistic rule learning in interactive environments remains less explored. We introduce RULEARN, a novel benchmark to assess the rule-learning abilities of LLM agents in interactive settings. In RULEARN, agents strategically interact with simulated environments to gather observations, discern patterns, and solve complex problems. To enhance the rule-learning capabilities for LLM agents, we propose IDEA, a novel reasoning framework that integrates the process of **I**nduction, **De**duction, and **A**bduction. The IDEA agent generates initial hypotheses from limited observations through abduction, devises plans to validate these hypotheses or leverages them to solve problems via deduction, and refines previous hypotheses through induction, dynamically establishing and applying rules that mimic human rule-learning behaviors. Our evaluation of the IDEA framework, which involves five representative LLMs, demonstrates significant improvements over the baseline. Furthermore, our study with human participants reveals notable discrepancies in rule-learning behaviors between humans and LLMs. We believe our benchmark will serve as a valuable and challenging resource, and IDEA will provide crucial insights for the development of LLM agents capable of human-like rule learning in real-world scenarios. Our code and data have been released at: https://github.com/KaiyuHe998/RULEARN{\_}IDEA."
}