arXiv:2510.03415v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Recent work asks whether large language models (LLMs) condition their reasoning on explicit rules rather than statistical regularities from pretraining. Program execution provides a canonical instance: formal semantics define behavior through symbolic transition rules that can be systematically altered under distribution shift. We investigate whether LLMs can condition their reasoning on formal semantics through program execution and introduce PLSemanticsBench, pairing featherweight C programs with two semantic systems -- small-step ope
Source: arXiv cs.AI — read the full report at the original publisher.