Coherence Under Commitment: Probing Generalization and Vacuous Memorization in LLM Logical Reasoning (opens in new tab)

Large language models (LLMs) deployed for logical reasoning in knowledge-intensive domains exhibit a subtle but critical failure: coherence can be vacuously achieved through systematic abstention. A model that withholds commitment to either entailment or refutation satisfies negation consistency while providing no utility. We introduce Coherence Under Commitment (CUC), a dual-query evaluation paradigm that jointly measures consistency and decisi...