Can Large Language Models Detect Errors in Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning?
This work addresses the need for developers to assess and improve error detection in long reasoning chains for LLMs, but it is incremental as it builds on existing benchmarks and models.
The paper tackles the problem of evaluating the quality of long Chain-of-Thought reasoning generated by o1-like models and the ability of existing LLMs to detect errors in these reasoning steps, by introducing DeltaBench for analysis and evaluation, finding limitations in current process reward and critic models.
Recently, o1-like models have drawn significant attention, where these models produce the long Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning steps to improve the reasoning abilities of existing Large Language Models (LLMs). In this paper, to understand the qualities of these long CoTs and measure the critique abilities of existing LLMs on these long CoTs, we introduce the DeltaBench, including the generated long CoTs from different o1-like models (e.g., QwQ, DeepSeek-R1) for different reasoning tasks (e.g., Math, Code, General Reasoning), to measure the ability to detect errors in long CoT reasoning. Based on DeltaBench, we first perform fine-grained analysis of the generated long CoTs to discover the effectiveness and efficiency of different o1-like models. Then, we conduct extensive evaluations of existing process reward models (PRMs) and critic models to detect the errors of each annotated process, which aims to investigate the boundaries and limitations of existing PRMs and critic models. Finally, we hope that DeltaBench could guide developers to better understand the long CoT reasoning abilities of their models.