DAG-Math: Graph-of-Thought Guided Mathematical Reasoning in LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Zhang, Yuanhe, Kuzborskij, Ilja, Lee, Jason D., Leng, Chenlei, Liu, Fanghui
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912933691260928
author Zhang, Yuanhe
Kuzborskij, Ilja
Lee, Jason D.
Leng, Chenlei
Liu, Fanghui
author_facet Zhang, Yuanhe
Kuzborskij, Ilja
Lee, Jason D.
Leng, Chenlei
Liu, Fanghui
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong performance on mathematical problems when prompted with Chain-of-Thought (CoT), yet it remains unclear whether this success stems from search, rote procedures, or rule-consistent reasoning. To address this, we propose modeling CoT as a certain rule-based stochastic process over directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), where nodes represent intermediate derivation states and edges encode rule applications. Within this framework, we introduce \textbf{logical closeness}, a metric that quantifies how well a model's CoT trajectory (i.e., the LLM's final output) adheres to the DAG structure, providing evaluation beyond classical PASS@$k$ metrics. Building on this, we introduce the \emph{DAG-MATH} CoT format and construct a benchmark that guides LLMs to generate CoT trajectories in this format, thereby enabling the evaluation of their reasoning ability under our framework. Across standard mathematical reasoning datasets, our analysis uncovers statistically significant differences in reasoning fidelity among representative LLM families-even when PASS@$k$ is comparable-highlighting gaps between final-answer accuracy and rule-consistent derivation. Our framework provides a balance between free-form CoT and formal proofs systems, offering actionable diagnostics for LLMs reasoning evaluation. Our benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/YuanheZ/DAG-MATH.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_19842
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle DAG-Math: Graph-of-Thought Guided Mathematical Reasoning in LLMs
Zhang, Yuanhe
Kuzborskij, Ilja
Lee, Jason D.
Leng, Chenlei
Liu, Fanghui
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate strong performance on mathematical problems when prompted with Chain-of-Thought (CoT), yet it remains unclear whether this success stems from search, rote procedures, or rule-consistent reasoning. To address this, we propose modeling CoT as a certain rule-based stochastic process over directed acyclic graphs (DAGs), where nodes represent intermediate derivation states and edges encode rule applications. Within this framework, we introduce \textbf{logical closeness}, a metric that quantifies how well a model's CoT trajectory (i.e., the LLM's final output) adheres to the DAG structure, providing evaluation beyond classical PASS@$k$ metrics. Building on this, we introduce the \emph{DAG-MATH} CoT format and construct a benchmark that guides LLMs to generate CoT trajectories in this format, thereby enabling the evaluation of their reasoning ability under our framework. Across standard mathematical reasoning datasets, our analysis uncovers statistically significant differences in reasoning fidelity among representative LLM families-even when PASS@$k$ is comparable-highlighting gaps between final-answer accuracy and rule-consistent derivation. Our framework provides a balance between free-form CoT and formal proofs systems, offering actionable diagnostics for LLMs reasoning evaluation. Our benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/YuanheZ/DAG-MATH.
title DAG-Math: Graph-of-Thought Guided Mathematical Reasoning in LLMs
topic Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.19842