Compositional Consistency-Guided Decoding for Three-Way Logical Question Answering

Abstract

Three-way logical question answering (QA) assigns one of $\text{True}$, $\text{False}$, or $\text{Unknown}$ to a hypothesis $H$ given a premise set $S$. We study this task as a compact compositional inference problem: predictions for $H$ and for a mechanically negated hypothesis $\neg H$ should agree under a deterministic negation map. Despite this simple structure, large language models (LLMs) can exhibit two practical failure modes: (i) negation inconsistency, where answers to $H$ and $\neg H$ violate the required label mapping, and (ii) epistemic $\text{Unknown}$, where the model abstains even when one side is entailed. We introduce CGD-PD, a lightweight, training-free test-time layer that combines neural 3-way classification, symbolic negation-consistency projection, and targeted binary entailment probes. On one validation split of FOLIO's first-order logic fields, CGD-PD improves accuracy by 4.4 points on GPT-5.2 and 6.8 points on Claude Sonnet 4.5, while reducing $\text{Unknown}$ predictions and epistemic abstention. These results provide a controlled proof of concept that simple logical composition at inference time can help evaluate and improve LLM reasoning reliability; they do not, by themselves, establish robustness beyond this formal benchmark setting.

Accepted at the ICML 2026 Workshop on Compositional Learning: Safety, Interpretability, and Agents