Evaluating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning through Reusability and Verifiability

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Auteurs principaux: Aggarwal, Shashank, Mishra, Ram Vikas, Awekar, Amit
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Aggarwal, Shashank
Mishra, Ram Vikas
Awekar, Amit
author_facet Aggarwal, Shashank
Mishra, Ram Vikas
Awekar, Amit
contents In multi-agent IR pipelines for tasks such as search and ranking, LLM-based agents exchange intermediate reasoning in terms of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) with each other. Current CoT evaluation narrowly focuses on target task accuracy. However, this metric fails to assess the quality or utility of the reasoning process itself. To address this limitation, we introduce two novel measures: reusability and verifiability. We decouple CoT generation from execution using a Thinker-Executor framework. Reusability measures how easily an Executor can reuse the Thinker's CoT. Verifiability measures how frequently an Executor can match the Thinker's answer using the CoT. We evaluated four Thinker models against a committee of ten Executor models across five benchmarks. Our results reveal that reusability and verifiability do not correlate with standard accuracy, exposing a blind spot in current accuracy-based leaderboards for reasoning capability. Surprisingly, we find that CoTs from specialized reasoning models are not consistently more reusable or verifiable than those from general-purpose LLMs like Llama and Gemma.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_17544
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning through Reusability and Verifiability
Aggarwal, Shashank
Mishra, Ram Vikas
Awekar, Amit
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
In multi-agent IR pipelines for tasks such as search and ranking, LLM-based agents exchange intermediate reasoning in terms of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) with each other. Current CoT evaluation narrowly focuses on target task accuracy. However, this metric fails to assess the quality or utility of the reasoning process itself. To address this limitation, we introduce two novel measures: reusability and verifiability. We decouple CoT generation from execution using a Thinker-Executor framework. Reusability measures how easily an Executor can reuse the Thinker's CoT. Verifiability measures how frequently an Executor can match the Thinker's answer using the CoT. We evaluated four Thinker models against a committee of ten Executor models across five benchmarks. Our results reveal that reusability and verifiability do not correlate with standard accuracy, exposing a blind spot in current accuracy-based leaderboards for reasoning capability. Surprisingly, we find that CoTs from specialized reasoning models are not consistently more reusable or verifiable than those from general-purpose LLMs like Llama and Gemma.
title Evaluating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning through Reusability and Verifiability
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.17544