6.5% of the Neuro-Symbolic Literature Can Be Reproduced from Its Published Artifacts, a Six-Stage Audit Framework and First Instantiation

A six-stage audit framework applied to the neuro-symbolic AI (NSAI) literature found that only 6.5% of 1,304 eligible studies could be fully or partially reproduced from their published artifacts, with 321 reruns blocked by missing non-code artifacts and 42 by missing or unusable code repositories. The authors, in an arXiv preprint (2608.26236v1), argue that empirical NSAI papers should be required to provide complete, versioned, and permanently archived artifact bundles at submission time.

arXiv:2608.26236v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We present a six-stage framework for auditing the reproducibility of scientific claims across a research literature within the computer science domain, and instantiate our framework for the neuro-symbolic AI NSAI subdomain. Instantiating the framework on the NSAI subdomain produced a multi-year audit. Stage one retrieved 5,497 records and removed 3,018 duplicates. Stage two screened the 2,479 unique records at title and abstract, identifying 1,365 self-identified NSAI records, then removed a further 61 at full text for off-topic, non-research, no-quantitative-evaluation, or inaccessible-full-text reasons. Stage three sought a verifiable public code artifact for each of the 1,304 eligible records and found none for 849, leaving 455 to enter the artifact inventory and bounded rerun of stages four and five. We fully or partially reproduced 85 studies, 6.52% of the eligible corpus and 18.68% of attempted reruns. We found that 321 attempted reruns were blocked by missing non- code artifacts and 42 by missing or unusable code repositories. These figures quantify a persistent reproducibility deficit that survives even nominal "code available" declarations, and signal the need for enforced, versioned, and permanently archived artifact bundles in future NSAI publications. We argue that empirical NSAI papers should be required at submission time to provide complete, versioned, and permanently archived artifact bundles.