Wiring the 'Why': A Unified Taxonomy and Survey of Abductive Reasoning in LLMs

ArXi:2604.08016v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Regardless of its foundational role in human discovery and sense-making, abductive reasoning--the inference of the most plausible explanation for an observation--has been relatively underexplored in Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite the rapid advancement of LLMs, the exploration of abductive reasoning and its diverse facets has thus far been disjointed rather than cohesive. This paper presents the first survey of abductive reasoning in LLMs, tracing its trajectory from philosophical foundations to contemporary AI implementations.