[hydrox24]

Is there a good reason to exclude abductive reasoning from an analysis like this? It's even considered by at least one of the referenced papers (Fangzhi 2023a).

Abductive reasoning is common in day-to-day life. It seeks the best explanation for some (often incomplete) observations, and reaches conclusions without certainty. I would have thought it would be important to assess for LLMs.

[refulgentis]

My instinct is it is a distinction without a difference in this context. i.e. if deductive is "I watched the cue ball hit the 8 ball, therefore, the 8 ball is moving" and abductive is "the 8 ball is moving towards me, therefore the cue ball must have hit it. I cannot claim to have deduced this because I did not observe it", LLMs cannot observe the situation, so any deduction (in the binary induction/deductive sense) must be done by abduction.

[soferio]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abductive_reasoning

Is abductive inference synonymous with bayesian inference?

[randcraw]

I like to think of abductive reasoning as the basis for science that explains natural processes that happened in the past -- like astronomy and geology and evolution -- where experiments are too big to conduct or processes too slow to observe in real-time. So we propose mechanistic explanations for nonobvious outcomes like the formations of stars, or motion of large land mass via plate tectonics or glaciation, or long-range organism speciation over millennia. That's the role for abduction, to explain how all that happened.

[keiferski]

Here’s a good page to read on that:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/abduction/#AbdVerBayConTh...

[User23]

No, but agreement with priors is one way one might choose between possibilities.

For example suppose you go outside and the streets are wet. Perhaps it rained, or perhaps someone drove a fire truck around spraying water all over the streets. You might select the former because of its higher prior probability.