Deogen: Automatic Benchmark Generation for Reasoning over Policies

Abstract:Language models are increasingly being deployed in regulated settings, where a model must apply given rules to the facts of a situation to determine a verdict. Benchmarking this capability, known as deontic reasoning, remains a costly and manual process, with existing datasets largely hand-crafted. In this paper, we present DeoGen, a scalable, automatic, and parametrizable benchmark generator for deontic reasoning. By autoformalizing policy rules to first-order logic, we can construct decision trees that capture possible outcome trajectories. Each path down a tree becomes a benchmark entry, with each tree producing combinatorially many entries relative to tree depth. Paths ending at a leaf entail a verdict, while non-leaf paths measure a model's ability to abstain when presented with insufficient information. Evaluations show frontier models return the correct verdict 89-92% of the time. Notably, performance degrades (22-40% correct) on entries without sufficient information to claim a verdict, even with explicit instructions to abstain in such cases. In all, DeoGen presents an automatic, scalable, and parametric method for generating deontic reasoning benchmarks.

Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2610.38687 [cs.AI]

(or arXiv:2610.38687v1 [cs.AI] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.38687 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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