LGMT: Logic-Grounded Metamorphic Testing for Evaluating the Reasoning Reliability of LLMs

Abstract: LLMs achieve strong performance on logical reasoning benchmarks, yet their reliability remains uncertain. Existing evaluations rely on static benchmarks, which fail to assess robustness under logically equivalent transformations and often overestimate reasoning capability. We propose LGMT (Logic-Grounded Metamorphic Testing), an oracle-free framework that leverages first-order logic (FOL) to evaluate LLM reasoning. By deriving metamorphic relations from formal logical equivalences, LGMT constructs semantically invariant test cases and detects reasoning defects through cross-case consistency checking. Experiments on six state-of-the-art LLMs show that LGMT exposes substantial hidden defects missed by traditional reference-based evaluations. We further find that models are particularly sensitive to symbol-level and conclusion-level variations, and that advanced prompting such as Few-shot CoT only partially mitigates these issues. These results suggest that LLM evaluation should move beyond isolated correctness toward robustness under logical invariance. LGMT provides a principled and scalable approach for diagnosing reasoning failures.