Kinship Data Benchmark for Multi-hop Reasoning

arXiv:2601.07794v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Multi-hop kinship reasoning is a natural testbed for LLM compositionality, but existing benchmarks (notably CLUTRR) cover only the descriptive Eskimo system. We introduce KinshipQA, a procedurally-generated benchmark covering seven anthropologically-documented kinship systems (Eskimo, Sudanese, Hawaiian, Iroquois, Dravidian, Crow, Omaha) and up to six reasoning hops, with a tunable simulator horizon that eliminates exact-instance pretraining overlap. Evaluating six LLMs, we find a 40.9% accuracy drop when reasoning shifts from biological multi-hop to culturally-marked classification on the five non-descriptive systems. The drop holds for every non-descriptive system and is largest for the two skewing systems (Crow, Omaha), persists under chain-of-thought and few-shot prompting, and compounds with depth: at 5--6 hops cultural override falls to 10.6% while biological composition over the same chains remains at 58.6%. Under identical rule access humans reach 89.0% versus 50.7% for LLMs, so the questions are reliably solvable once the rule is supplied. Two follow-up experiments suggest distinct contributors. A fictional-rule control swapping system labels and kin terms for invented strings raises accuracy by 6.1%, implicating familiar English surface forms. An in-context-rule probe prepending the override rule helps skewing systems (+17.1%) but hurts non-skewing systems whose baseline already exceeds about 60% (-13.4%), consistent with a missing skewing prior alongside rule interference where the model already has a working approximation. Our code and data are publicly available on GitHub.