Locally Sound, Globally Insufficient: The Local-Global Gap in Multi-Hop Reasoning
Reliable multi-hop reasoning requires more than locally supported steps: a trace can be sound at every reasoning step yet still fail to answer the question as a whole. We call this failure regime the local-global gap (LGG), in which the trace is locally sound yet globally insufficient. Local soundness requires each step to be supported by the available evidence and preceding steps, whereas global sufficiency requires the reasoning trace to align with the question and establish the submitted answer. In a human-adjudicated diagnostic of 2,598 responses across three multi-hop QA benchmarks and three models, we find that the LGG occurs in every benchmark-model combination and accounts for nea...
| Authors | Bohao Chu, Hendrik Damm, Qianli Wang et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 26 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 September 2026 |
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