arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 21

Diagnostic Analysis for Large Language Model Reasoning

The paper introduces a two-stage diagnostic evaluation to assess the structural reliability of reasoning graphs used in large language models for tasks like multi-hop question answering. Stage 1 examines how graph reliability depends on topology, prompt design, and model family, while Stage 2 evaluates the impact of graph errors on uncertainty estimation. Findings show that graph-based computation is vulnerable to upstream errors, offers limited benefit as prompt context alone, but improves confidence-based answer discrimination and enables node-level diagnostics.

By Xinyu Liu, Dongqi Fu, Jun Wu