AdapTime: Enabling Adaptive Temporal Reasoning in Large Language Models

摘要

Large language models have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities in general knowledge question answering. However, their ability to handle temporal information remains limited. To address this limitation, existing approaches often design time-sensitive reasoning pipelines that rely on external tools or manual verification and are tailored to specific scenarios, leading to poor generalizability. Moreover, these methods apply a fixed pipeline to all questions, overlooking the fact that different types of temporal questions often require distinct reasoning strategies, which leads to unnecessary processing for simple cases and inadequate reasoning for more complex ones. To this end, we propose AdapTime, an adaptive temporal reasoning method that dynamically executes reasoning steps based on the input context and task requirements. Specifically, it involves three temporal reasoning actions: reformulate, rewrite and review, with an LLM planner guiding the reasoning process. AdapTime integrates seamlessly with state-of-the-art LLMs and significantly enhances their temporal reasoning capabilities without relying on external support. Extensive experiments on two temporal QA benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.