Abstract
The ability to integrate new information and deduce its consequences is central to learning, understanding, and reasoning in large language models (LLMs). Whether information arrives during training or in-context, models must not only store local facts, but propagate their long-range implications globally. To explore information integration in LLMs, we introduce two complementary natural language benchmarks for large-scale evaluation of deductive reasoning as a function of inference depth. The first is a formal graph benchmark enabling controlled evaluation over a wide range of graph topologies and integration tasks; the second is a knowledge composition benchmark grounded in real-world knowledge graphs. We use these benchmarks to compare knowledge integration from information encoded in context versus information encoded in model weights during pretraining, evaluating a set of open models implicitly, without chain of thought. We find that accuracy decays sharply with increased composition length for both pretrained and in-context knowledge. Information presented in-context, however, substantially outperforms deduction over information encoded in weights. These results quantify a fundamental limitation of current models with direct implications for prompt-based control of agent behavior and for continual learning strategies, and they provide a foundation for developing training, prompting, and integration methods that support deeper reasoning.
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URL
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.41169
