A Survey of Inductive Reasoning for Large Language Models
Authors
Kedi Chen
Dezhao Ruan
Yuhao Dan
Yaoting Wang
Siyu Yan
Xuecheng Wu
Yinqi Zhang
Qin Chen
Jie Zhou
Liang He
Biqing Qi
Linyang Li
Qipeng Guo
Xiaoming Shi
Wei Zhang
Abstract
Reasoning is an important task for large language models (LLMs). Among all the reasoning paradigms, inductive reasoning is one of the fundamental types, which is characterized by its particular-to-general thinking process and the non-uniqueness of its answers. The inductive mode is crucial for knowledge generalization and aligns better with human cognition, so it is a fundamental mode of learning, hence attracting increasing interest. Despite the importance of inductive reasoning, there is no systematic summary of it. Therefore, this paper presents the first comprehensive survey of inductive reasoning for LLMs. First, methods for improving inductive reasoning are categorized into three main areas: post-training, test-time scaling, and data augmentation. Then, current benchmarks of inductive reasoning are summarized, and a unified sandbox-based evaluation approach with the observation coverage metric is derived. Finally, we offer some analyses regarding the source of inductive ability and how simple model architectures and data help with inductive tasks, providing a solid foundation for future research.
