Improving Human Verification of LLM Reasoning through Interactive Explanation Interfaces

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Main Authors: Zhou, Runtao, Nguyen, Giang, Kharya, Nikita, Nguyen, Anh Totti, Agarwal, Chirag
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhou, Runtao
Nguyen, Giang
Kharya, Nikita
Nguyen, Anh Totti
Agarwal, Chirag
author_facet Zhou, Runtao
Nguyen, Giang
Kharya, Nikita
Nguyen, Anh Totti
Agarwal, Chirag
contents The reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to their increasing employment in several critical applications, particularly education, where they support problem-solving, tutoring, and personalized study. Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning capabilities [1, 2] are well-known to help LLMs decompose a problem into steps and explore the solution spaces more effectively, leading to impressive performance on mathematical and reasoning benchmarks. As the length of CoT tokens per question increases substantially to even thousands of tokens per question [ 1], it is unknown how users could comprehend LLM reasoning and detect errors or hallucinations. To address this problem and understand how reasoning can improve human-AI interaction, we present three new interactive reasoning interfaces: interactive CoT (iCoT), interactive Program-of-Thought (iPoT), and interactive Graph (iGraph). That is, we ask LLMs themselves to generate an interactive web interface wrapped around the original CoT content, which may be presented in text (iCoT), graphs (iGraph) or code (iPoT). This interface allows users to interact with and provide a novel experience in reading and validating the reasoning chains of LLMs. Across a study of 125 participants, interactive interfaces significantly improve user performance. Specifically, iGraph users score the highest error detection rate (85.6%), followed by iPoT (82.5%), iCoT (80.6%), all outperforming standard CoT (73.5%). Interactive interfaces also lead to faster user validation time-iGraph users are faster (57.9 secs per question) than the users of iCoT and iPoT (60 secs) and the standard CoT (64.7 secs). A post-study questionnaire shows that users prefer iGraph, citing its superior ability to enable them to follow the LLM's reasoning. We discuss the implications of these results and provide recommendations for the future design of reasoning models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_22922
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving Human Verification of LLM Reasoning through Interactive Explanation Interfaces
Zhou, Runtao
Nguyen, Giang
Kharya, Nikita
Nguyen, Anh Totti
Agarwal, Chirag
Human-Computer Interaction
The reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to their increasing employment in several critical applications, particularly education, where they support problem-solving, tutoring, and personalized study. Chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning capabilities [1, 2] are well-known to help LLMs decompose a problem into steps and explore the solution spaces more effectively, leading to impressive performance on mathematical and reasoning benchmarks. As the length of CoT tokens per question increases substantially to even thousands of tokens per question [ 1], it is unknown how users could comprehend LLM reasoning and detect errors or hallucinations. To address this problem and understand how reasoning can improve human-AI interaction, we present three new interactive reasoning interfaces: interactive CoT (iCoT), interactive Program-of-Thought (iPoT), and interactive Graph (iGraph). That is, we ask LLMs themselves to generate an interactive web interface wrapped around the original CoT content, which may be presented in text (iCoT), graphs (iGraph) or code (iPoT). This interface allows users to interact with and provide a novel experience in reading and validating the reasoning chains of LLMs. Across a study of 125 participants, interactive interfaces significantly improve user performance. Specifically, iGraph users score the highest error detection rate (85.6%), followed by iPoT (82.5%), iCoT (80.6%), all outperforming standard CoT (73.5%). Interactive interfaces also lead to faster user validation time-iGraph users are faster (57.9 secs per question) than the users of iCoT and iPoT (60 secs) and the standard CoT (64.7 secs). A post-study questionnaire shows that users prefer iGraph, citing its superior ability to enable them to follow the LLM's reasoning. We discuss the implications of these results and provide recommendations for the future design of reasoning models.
title Improving Human Verification of LLM Reasoning through Interactive Explanation Interfaces
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.22922