Quantifying Consistency in LLM Logical Reasoning via Structural Uncertainty

Researchers propose structural uncertainty, a framework that measures consistency in LLM logical reasoning by analyzing self-preference-induced rankings over sampled solutions. Across five LLMs and eight benchmarks, combining structural signals with answer dispersion improves identification of unreliable instances in logical and mathematical reasoning tasks. The two entropy-based components—within-trial ambiguity and across-trial instability—correlate differently with accuracy, revealing regime boundaries where reasoning-level consistency evaluation is informative.

arXiv:2606.17312v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can arrive at the same answer through reasoning paths that are unstable, contradictory, or difficult to rank consistently -- a failure mode especially prevalent in multi-step deductive reasoning. Existing methods assess reliability primarily through output dispersion -- measuring how much sampled answers differ -- but this discards a complementary signal: whether the model can consistently rank competing reasoning candidates. We propose structural uncertainty, a consistency-aware framework derived from the stability of self-preference-induced rankings over sampled reasoning solutions. Given a query, we generate multiple candidate solutions and ask the model to judge pairwise preferences among its own outputs. We aggregate self-preferences into ranking distributions via Bradley-Terry modeling with PageRank, and decompose the signal into two entropy-based components: across-trial ranking instability and within-trial candidate ambiguity. Across five LLMs and eight benchmarks, structural signals provide information complementary to answer dispersion: on logical and mathematical reasoning tasks, the combination improves identification of unreliable instances, while on factual retrieval the structural signal collapses toward uniformity, diagnosing a regime boundary where reasoning-level consistency evaluation is uninformative. The two components relate differently to accuracy: within-trial ambiguity correlates positively with correctness -- consistent with settings where multiple plausible solution paths remain competitive -- while across-trial instability correlates negatively, signaling unreliable reasoning. Structural uncertainty is best understood not as a universal confidence estimator, but as a regime-sensitive evaluator of logical reasoning consistency.