\texttt{ReMind}: Understanding Deductive Code Reasoning in LLMs

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2511.00488v1
• Date: Sat, 01 Nov 2025 10:42:40 GMT
• Title: \texttt{ReMind}: Understanding Deductive Code Reasoning in LLMs
• Abstract summary: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in code-related tasks.<n>They still struggle with emphdeductive code reasoning, the ability to reason about the program execution process.<n>We propose textttReMind, a multi-agent framework composed of textttMutator, textttExecutor, and textttInspector.
• Score: 6.918479033945452
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in code-related tasks. Despite their advancement, empirical evidence reveals that they still struggle with \emph{deductive code reasoning}, the ability to reason about the program execution process. While prior studies have recognized this limitation, the underlying causes remain largely underexplored. In this paper, we begin by presenting a comprehensive empirical study that reveals three key challenges undermining deductive code reasoning: (1) an intrinsic gap between generation and reasoning abilities, (2) a consistent bias towards code sources, and (3) weak zero-shot generalization on complex benchmarks. In light of these challenges, we propose \texttt{ReMind}, a multi-agent framework composed of \texttt{Mutator}, \texttt{Executor}, and \texttt{Inspector}. The \texttt{Mutator} generates code variants to mitigate bias towards code sources, the \texttt{Executor} traces variable states step-by-step to expose inconsistency, and the \texttt{Inspector} identifies problematic reasoning steps and provides control-flow refinement to bridge the intrinsic reasoning gap. Through their coordinated collaboration, \texttt{ReMind} systematically identifies and refines reasoning flaws, achieving outstanding performance and enabling robust zero-shot generalization. Extensive experiments on two benchmarks with five LLMs demonstrate the superior advantages of \texttt{ReMind} compared to baseline approaches in deductive code reasoning.

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