Morning Edition · Thursday, July 30, 2026Published at 1:37 AM EDT · New York

Reference-Free Score Aims to Catch Chain-of-Thought That Reaches Right Answers for Wrong Reasons

The method scores derivation validity directly, targeting cases where an invalid chain accidentally produces a correct final answer.

Standard chain-of-thought (CoT) evaluation reduces to a single check. Does the final answer match the reference. A new paper argues that this confuses two different things, reaching a correct conclusion and producing a valid derivation, bec…