This survey paper proposes a clearer view of natural language reasoning in the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), both conceptually and practically. Conceptually, we provide a distinct definition for natural language reasoning in NLP, based on both philosophy and NLP scenarios, discuss what types of tasks require reasoning, and introduce a taxonomy of reasoning. Practically, we conduct a comprehensive literature review on natural language reasoning in NLP, mainly covering classical logical reasoning, natural language inference, multi-hop question answering, and commonsense reasoning. The paper also identifies and views backward reasoning, a powerful paradigm for multi-step reasoning, and introduces defeasible reasoning as one of the most important future directions in natural language reasoning research. We focus on single-modality unstructured natural language text, excluding neuro-symbolic techniques and mathematical reasoning.
Idiap Research Institute（伊迪亚普研究所）；University of Manchester（曼彻斯特大学）；National Biomarker Centre, CRUK-MI, University of Manchester（英国癌症研究中心曼彻斯特研究所国家生物标志物中心（曼彻斯特大学））
Reasoning Beyond Language: A Comprehensive Survey on Latent Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University（计算机系，香港理工大学）；Ningbo Digital Twin Institute, Eastern Institute of Technology（宁波数字孪生研究院，东部技术研究所）
A Survey of Mathematical Reasoning in the Era of Multimodal Large Language Model: Benchmark, Method & Challenges
The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Nanyang Technological University（南洋理工大学）；Squirrel Ai Learning（松鼠Ai学习）
A Survey of Efficient Reasoning for Large Reasoning Models: Language, Multimodality, and Beyond
Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）；Soochow University（苏州大学）；Westlake University（西湖大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；Tongji University（同济大学）；The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology（香港科技大学）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Huazhong University of Science and Technology（华中科技大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）
The Periodic Table of LLM Reasoning: A Structured Survey of Reasoning Paradigms, Methods, and Failure Modes
Singapore Institute of Technology（新加坡理工大学）；Nvidia AI Center (SNAIC)（英伟达人工智能中心（SNAIC））；MIDAS Lab, IIIT Delhi（IIIT德里MIDAS实验室）；MIDAS Lab, IIT Mandi（IIT曼迪MIDAS实验室）；Owl Autonomous Imaging, Inc.（Owl自主成像公司）；College of Computing & Data Science, NTU Singapore（新加坡南洋理工大学计算与数据科学学院）；NVIDIA AI Technology Centre, Singapore（英伟达新加坡人工智能技术中心）；Department of Computer Science and Engineering, IIT Kanpur（IIT坎普尔计算机科学与工程系）
Putting on the Thinking Hats: A Survey on Chain of Thought Fine-tuning from the Perspective of Human Reasoning Mechanism
College of Computer Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology（计算机科学与技术学院，国防科技大学）；College of Intelligence Science and Technology, National University of Defense Technology（智能科学与技术学院，国防科技大学）
Efficient Inference for Large Reasoning Models: A Survey
National University of Singapore（新加坡国立大学）；HKUST (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；UCAS（中国科学院大学）；Moonshot AI（月之暗面）；Westlake University（西湖大学）；State University of New York（纽约州立大学）
Enhancing Large Language Model Reasoning with Reward Models: An Analytical Survey
Department of Data Science and Hong Kong Institute of AI for Science, City University of Hong Kong（数据科学系和香港人工智能科学研究所，香港城市大学）；Li Auto Inc., China（中国利汽车公司）；Department of Statistics, University of Oxford（统计系，牛津大学）
Implicit Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey
Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou)（香港科技大学（广州））；Jilin University（吉林大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；Yale University（耶鲁大学）
Towards Agentic RAG with Deep Reasoning: A Survey of RAG-Reasoning Systems in LLMs
Tsinghua University（清华大学）；University of Illinois Chicago（伊利诺伊大学芝加哥分校）；The University of Tokyo（东京大学）；Peking University（北京大学）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）；University of California, Los Angeles（加利福尼亚大学洛杉矶分校）；HKUST（香港科技大学）
Harnessing the Reasoning Economy: A Survey of Efficient Reasoning for Large Language Models
The Chinese University of Hong Kong（香港中文大学）；University of Macau（澳门大学）；The University of Hong Kong（香港大学）；Princeton University（普林斯顿大学）；University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign（伊利诺伊大学厄巴纳-香槟分校）
Puzzle Solving using Reasoning of Large Language Models: A Survey
Artificial Intelligence and Learning Systems Laboratory（人工智能与学习系统实验室）；School of Electrical and Computer Engineering（电气与计算机工程学院）；National Technical University of Athens（希腊雅典国家技术大学）
A Survey of Inductive Reasoning for Large Language Models
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；Shanghai Innovation Institute（上海创新研究院）；Fudan University（复旦大学）；Xi’an Jiaotong University（西安交通大学）；Shanghai AI Laboratory（上海人工智能实验室）
