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Topic 5: Reasoning Evaluation

What You’ll Learn

This topic teaches you how to:

  • Evaluate chain-of-thought reasoning
  • Test multi-step reasoning
  • Assess planning quality
  • Analyze reasoning traces
  • Measure reasoning correctness

Why We Need This

Business Need

  • Quality: Better reasoning = better results
  • Trust: Users need to trust agent decisions
  • Debugging: Understand why agents make decisions

Technical Need

  • Reasoning quality: Measure how well agents reason
  • Trace analysis: Understand agent thought process
  • Planning evaluation: Test planning capabilities

Industry Use Cases

1. Decision-Making Agents

Company: Trading, healthcare, finance Use Case: Evaluate reasoning behind decisions

2. Problem-Solving Agents

Company: Research, engineering Use Case: Test multi-step problem solving

3. Planning Agents

Company: Automation, robotics Use Case: Evaluate planning quality

Industry-Standard Boilerplate Code

Reasoning Evaluator

"""
Reasoning Evaluator
Evaluates agent reasoning capabilities
"""
from typing import List, Dict

class ReasoningEvaluator:
    """Evaluate agent reasoning"""
    
    def evaluate_chain_of_thought(self, agent, task: str) -> Dict:
        """Evaluate chain-of-thought reasoning"""
        result = agent.run(task)
        reasoning_steps = result.get('reasoning_steps', [])
        
        return {
            "steps_count": len(reasoning_steps),
            "logical_flow": self._check_logical_flow(reasoning_steps),
            "completeness": self._check_completeness(reasoning_steps, task)
        }
    
    def _check_logical_flow(self, steps: List) -> bool:
        """Check if reasoning steps flow logically"""
        # Simplified: In production, use LLM or rule-based checks
        return len(steps) > 0
    
    def _check_completeness(self, steps: List, task: str) -> bool:
        """Check if reasoning addresses the task"""
        # Simplified: In production, use semantic analysis
        return True

Exercises

  1. Evaluate chain-of-thought
  2. Test multi-step reasoning
  3. Analyze reasoning traces
  4. Measure planning quality

Next Steps

  • Topic 6: Safety evaluation
  • Topic 7: Multi-agent evaluation