Omanic: Towards Step-wise Evaluation of Multi-hop Reasoning in Large Language Models

Xiaojie Gu, Sherry T. Tong, Aosong Feng, Sophia Simeng Han, Jinghui Lu, Yingjian Chen, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Chanjun Park, Rex Ying, Irene Li


Abstract
Evaluating the reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs) solely from final answers can obscure failures in intermediate steps, especially in multi-hop QA benchmarks without step-level annotations. To address this gap, we introduce Omanic, an open-domain 4-hop QA benchmark designed not only to measure final-answer accuracy but also to diagnose where reasoning breaks down. Omanic contains 10,296 machine-generated training examples (OmanicSynth) and 967 expert-reviewed human-annotated evaluation examples (OmanicBench), with each evaluation question decomposed into single-hop sub-questions, intermediate answers, and structured graph topologies. Experiments with proprietary and open-source LLMs show that Omanic is challenging, while step-wise analysis reveals a later-hop bottleneck, factual knowledge floor, and error propagation along reasoning chains. Fine-tuning on OmanicSynth transfers to six reasoning and mathematics benchmarks, yielding a 7.41-point average gain and validating its effectiveness as supervision for reasoning-capability transfer. We release the data at https://huggingface.co/datasets/li-lab/Omanic.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.1714
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
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SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
36623–36647
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1714/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiaojie Gu, Sherry T. Tong, Aosong Feng, Sophia Simeng Han, Jinghui Lu, Yingjian Chen, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo, Chanjun Park, Rex Ying, and Irene Li. 2026. Omanic: Towards Step-wise Evaluation of Multi-hop Reasoning in Large Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 36623–36647, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Omanic: Towards Step-wise Evaluation of Multi-hop Reasoning in Large Language Models (Gu et al., Findings 2026)
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https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1714.pdf