Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning Beyond Accuracy

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Xia, Shijie, Li, Xuefeng, Liu, Yixin, Wu, Tongshuang, Liu, Pengfei
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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author Xia, Shijie
Li, Xuefeng
Liu, Yixin
Wu, Tongshuang
Liu, Pengfei
author_facet Xia, Shijie
Li, Xuefeng
Liu, Yixin
Wu, Tongshuang
Liu, Pengfei
contents The leaderboard of Large Language Models (LLMs) in mathematical tasks has been continuously updated. However, the majority of evaluations focus solely on the final results, neglecting the quality of the intermediate steps. This oversight can mask underlying problems, such as logical errors or unnecessary steps in the reasoning process. To measure reasoning beyond final-answer accuracy, we introduce ReasonEval, a new methodology for evaluating the quality of reasoning steps. ReasonEval employs validity and redundancy to characterize the reasoning quality, as well as accompanying LLMs to assess them automatically. We explore different design options for the LLM-based evaluators and empirically demonstrate that ReasonEval, when instantiated with base models possessing strong mathematical knowledge and trained with high-quality labeled data, consistently outperforms baseline methods in the meta-evaluation datasets. We also highlight the strong generalization capabilities of ReasonEval. By utilizing ReasonEval to evaluate LLMs specialized in math, we find that an increase in final-answer accuracy does not necessarily guarantee an improvement in the overall quality of the reasoning steps for challenging mathematical problems. Additionally, we observe that ReasonEval can play a significant role in data selection. We open-source the best-performing model, meta-evaluation script, and all evaluation results to facilitate future research.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_05692
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning Beyond Accuracy
Xia, Shijie
Li, Xuefeng
Liu, Yixin
Wu, Tongshuang
Liu, Pengfei
Computation and Language
The leaderboard of Large Language Models (LLMs) in mathematical tasks has been continuously updated. However, the majority of evaluations focus solely on the final results, neglecting the quality of the intermediate steps. This oversight can mask underlying problems, such as logical errors or unnecessary steps in the reasoning process. To measure reasoning beyond final-answer accuracy, we introduce ReasonEval, a new methodology for evaluating the quality of reasoning steps. ReasonEval employs validity and redundancy to characterize the reasoning quality, as well as accompanying LLMs to assess them automatically. We explore different design options for the LLM-based evaluators and empirically demonstrate that ReasonEval, when instantiated with base models possessing strong mathematical knowledge and trained with high-quality labeled data, consistently outperforms baseline methods in the meta-evaluation datasets. We also highlight the strong generalization capabilities of ReasonEval. By utilizing ReasonEval to evaluate LLMs specialized in math, we find that an increase in final-answer accuracy does not necessarily guarantee an improvement in the overall quality of the reasoning steps for challenging mathematical problems. Additionally, we observe that ReasonEval can play a significant role in data selection. We open-source the best-performing model, meta-evaluation script, and all evaluation results to facilitate future research.
title Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning Beyond Accuracy
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.05692