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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18134 |
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| _version_ | 1866908829652877312 |
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| author | Abbasloo, Soheil |
| author_facet | Abbasloo, Soheil |
| contents | What does it truly mean for a language model to "reason"? Current evaluations reward models' correct standalone answers-but correctness alone reveals little about the process that produced them. We argue that reasoning should be understood not as a static chain of steps but as a dynamic trajectory in which ideas interact, clash, and evolve into integrated insights. Building on the philosophical tradition of dialectics, we introduce SIEV, a structured evaluation framework that assesses reasoning through explicit thesis-antithesis-synthesis interactions. SIEV produces interpretable trajectories that highlight key properties of reasoning-robustness to challenge, adaptability under conflict, and synthesis across competing viewpoints-dimensions that conventional correctness-based metrics cannot capture. Empirical results on GSM and MMLU demonstrate substantial gaps in the reasoning abilities of state-of-the-art models: for example, GPT-5-chat loses more than 40 points (out of 100) on GSM when evaluated through SIEV's process-oriented lens. By shifting focus from what answer a model gives to how it arrives there, SIEV enables a more transparent and principled distinction between structured reasoning and surface-level pattern generation offering a clearer foundation for assessing and understanding the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_18134 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Evaluating LLM Reasoning Beyond Correctness and CoT Abbasloo, Soheil Artificial Intelligence What does it truly mean for a language model to "reason"? Current evaluations reward models' correct standalone answers-but correctness alone reveals little about the process that produced them. We argue that reasoning should be understood not as a static chain of steps but as a dynamic trajectory in which ideas interact, clash, and evolve into integrated insights. Building on the philosophical tradition of dialectics, we introduce SIEV, a structured evaluation framework that assesses reasoning through explicit thesis-antithesis-synthesis interactions. SIEV produces interpretable trajectories that highlight key properties of reasoning-robustness to challenge, adaptability under conflict, and synthesis across competing viewpoints-dimensions that conventional correctness-based metrics cannot capture. Empirical results on GSM and MMLU demonstrate substantial gaps in the reasoning abilities of state-of-the-art models: for example, GPT-5-chat loses more than 40 points (out of 100) on GSM when evaluated through SIEV's process-oriented lens. By shifting focus from what answer a model gives to how it arrives there, SIEV enables a more transparent and principled distinction between structured reasoning and surface-level pattern generation offering a clearer foundation for assessing and understanding the reasoning capabilities of LLMs. |
| title | Evaluating LLM Reasoning Beyond Correctness and CoT |
| topic | Artificial Intelligence |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.18134 |