![[2602.17544] Evaluating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning through Reusability and Verifiability](https://arxiv.org/static/browse/0.3.4/images/arxiv-logo-fb.png){kind=logo}
[2602.17544] Evaluating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning through Reusability and Verifiability
Summary
This paper evaluates Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning in AI through new metrics of reusability and verifiability, revealing limitations of current accuracy-based evaluations.
Why It Matters
Understanding the effectiveness of Chain-of-Thought reasoning is crucial for improving AI models. This study introduces innovative metrics that challenge existing evaluation methods, highlighting the need for a more nuanced approach to assess AI reasoning capabilities.
Key Takeaways
- Introduces reusability and verifiability as new metrics for evaluating CoT reasoning.
- Finds that current accuracy metrics do not correlate with reasoning quality.
- Demonstrates that specialized reasoning models may not outperform general-purpose LLMs.
- Utilizes a Thinker-Executor framework to decouple CoT generation from execution.
- Calls for a reevaluation of leaderboard metrics in AI reasoning tasks.
Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence arXiv:2602.17544 (cs) [Submitted on 19 Feb 2026] Title:Evaluating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning through Reusability and Verifiability Authors:Shashank Aggarwal, Ram Vikas Mishra, Amit Awekar View a PDF of the paper titled Evaluating Chain-of-Thought Reasoning through Reusability and Verifiability, by Shashank Aggarwal and 2 other authors View PDF HTML (experimental) Abstract: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 ge...