Residual Drift Dominates Contradiction in Multi-Turn Constraint Reasoning
How do multi-turn reasoning systems fail? The expected answer is logical contradiction, in which the system's maintained state becomes unsatisfiable. We show that the dominant mode is instead satisfiable drift, where the internal state stays consistent while the returned answer silently violates prior commitments. We build DRIFT-Bench (Decomposing Reasoning Into Failure Types), a solver-instrumented benchmark of 816 test problems across three constraint domains, and evaluate four methods on it across four open-weight models (8B-120B parameters). MUS-Repair, which feeds minimal unsatisfiable subsets back to the generator, is strongest in every setting (+1.8 to +15.0 pp over the best non-MU...
| Authors | Sebastien Kawada |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.AI |
| Published | 28 April 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 28 April 2026 |
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