Wiring the 'Why': A Unified Taxonomy and Survey of Abductive Reasoning in LLMs
Regardless of its foundational role in human discovery and sense-making, abductive reasoning--the inference of the most plausible explanation for an observation--has been relatively underexplored in Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite the rapid advancement of LLMs, the exploration of abductive reasoning and its diverse facets has thus far been disjointed rather than cohesive. This paper presents the first survey of abductive reasoning in LLMs, tracing its trajectory from philosophical foundations to contemporary AI implementations. To address the widespread conceptual confusion and disjointed task definitions prevalent in the field, we establish a unified two-stage definition that forma...
| Authors | Moein Salimi, Shaygan Adim, Danial Parnian et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 9 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 April 2026 |
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