A Chain-of-Thought Is as Strong as Its Weakest Link: A Benchmark for Verifiers of Reasoning Chains

Alon Jacovi, Yonatan Bitton, Bernd Bohnet, Jonathan Herzig, Or Honovich, Michael Tseng, Michael Collins, Roee Aharoni, Mor Geva


Abstract
Prompting language models to provide step-by-step answers (e.g., “Chain-of-Thought”) is the prominent approach for complex reasoning tasks, where more accurate reasoning chains typically improve downstream task performance. Recent literature discusses automatic methods to verify reasoning to evaluate and improve their correctness. However, no fine-grained step-level datasets are available to enable thorough evaluation of such verification methods, hindering progress in this direction. We introduce REVEAL: Reasoning Verification Evaluation, a dataset to benchmark automatic verifiers of complex Chain-of-Thought reasoning in open-domain question-answering settings. REVEAL includes comprehensive labels for the relevance, attribution to evidence passages, and logical correctness of each reasoning step in a language model’s answer, across a variety of datasets and state-of-the-art language models. Evaluation on REVEAL shows that verifiers struggle at verifying reasoning chains - in particular, verifying logical correctness and detecting contradictions. Available at https://reveal-dataset.github.io/ .
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.254
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4615–4634
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.254
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.acl-long.254
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Alon Jacovi, Yonatan Bitton, Bernd Bohnet, Jonathan Herzig, Or Honovich, Michael Tseng, Michael Collins, Roee Aharoni, and Mor Geva. 2024. A Chain-of-Thought Is as Strong as Its Weakest Link: A Benchmark for Verifiers of Reasoning Chains. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 4615–4634, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Chain-of-Thought Is as Strong as Its Weakest Link: A Benchmark for Verifiers of Reasoning Chains (Jacovi et al., ACL 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.254.pdf