How do you evaluate an agent’s reasoning without exposing chain-of-thought?

Question

Accepted Answer

To evaluate an agent’s reasoning without exposing its chain-of-thought, focus primarily on the quality and utility of its final output. This involves defining clear success metrics and rubrics that assess the output against predefined criteria such as accuracy, completeness, relevance, coherence, and adherence to specific instructions or constraints. Human evaluation by subject matter experts is often crucial, as they can judge the soundness and logical consistency of the end result, even without knowing the intermediate steps. Furthermore, automated methods can check for factual correctness and semantic similarity of the final answer against a ground truth or reliable knowledge base. By carefully analyzing patterns of errors and successes in the agent's observable responses, one can infer potential weaknesses or strengths in its underlying reasoning process, guiding iterative improvements.