Logic Sketch Prompting (LSP): A Deterministic and Interpretable Prompting Method

Abstract: LLMs excel at natural language reasoning but remain unreliable on tasks requiring strict rule adherence, determinism, and auditability. Logic Sketch Prompting (LSP) is a lightweight prompting framework that introduces typed variables, deterministic condition evaluators, and a rule based validator that produces traceable and repeatable outputs. Using two pharmacologic logic compliance tasks, we benchmark LSP against zero shot prompting, chain of thought prompting, and concise prompting across three open weight models: Gemma 2, Mistral, and Llama 3. Across both tasks and all models, LSP consistently achieves the highest accuracy (0.83 to 0.89) and F1 score (0.83 to 0.89), substantially outperforming zero shot prompting (0.24 to 0.60), concise prompts (0.16 to 0.30), and chain of thought prompting (0.56 to 0.75). McNemar tests show statistically significant gains for LSP across nearly all comparisons (p < 0.01). These results demonstrate that LSP improves determinism, interpretability, and consistency without sacrificing performance, supporting its use in clinical, regulated, and safety critical decision support systems.