TRACE: Toulmin-based Reasoning Assessment through Constructive Elements for LLM CoT Evaluation

arXiv:2605.29656v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating open-ended outputs from large language models (LLMs) remains challenging due to the absence of ground truth. Existing metrics rely on final-answer accuracy or surface-level statistics, leaving the reasoning process itself unexamined. We introduce TRACE (Toulmin-based Reasoning Assessment through Constructive Elements), a metric that analyzes Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning processes. Rather than judging outcomes, TRACE inspects how argu