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| Main Authors: | , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.20665 |
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Table of Contents:
- Evaluating the quality of reasoning traces from large language models remains understudied, labor-intensive, and unreliable: current practice relies on expert rubrics, manual annotation, and slow pairwise judgments. Automated efforts are dominated by graph-based proxies that quantify structural connectivity but do not clarify what constitutes high-quality reasoning; such abstractions can be overly simplistic for inherently complex processes. We introduce a topological data analysis (TDA)-based evaluation framework that captures the geometry of reasoning traces and enables label-efficient, automated assessment. In our empirical study, topological features yield substantially higher predictive power for assessing reasoning quality than standard graph metrics, suggesting that effective reasoning is better captured by higher-dimensional geometric structures rather than purely relational graphs. We further show that a compact, stable set of topological features reliably indicates trace quality, offering a practical signal for future reinforcement learning algorithms.