CriticBench: Benchmarking LLMs for Critique-Correct Reasoning

The ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to critique and refine their reasoning is crucial for their application in evaluation, feedback provision, and self-improvement. This paper introduces CRITICBENCH, a comprehensive benchmark designed to assess LLMs' abilities to critique and rectify their reasoning across a variety of tasks. CRITICBENCH encompasses five reasoning domains: mathematical, commonsense, symbolic, coding, and algorithmic. It compiles 15 datasets and incorporates responses from three LLM families. Utilizing CRITICBENCH, we evaluate and dissect the performance of 17 LLMs in generation, critique, and correction reasoning, i.e., GQC reasoning, and analyze the key factors affecting LLM critical reasoning. Our findings reveal: (1) a linear relationship in GQC capabilities, with critiquefocused training markedly enhancing performance; (2) a task-dependent variation in critique and correction effectiveness, with logicoriented tasks being more amenable to correction; (3) GQC knowledge inconsistencies that decrease as model size increases; and (4) an intriguing inter-model critiquing pattern, where stronger models are better at critiquing weaker ones, while weaker models can surprisingly surpass stronger ones in their self-critique. We hope these insights into the nuanced critiquecorrect reasoning of LLMs will foster further research in LLM critique and self-improvement 1 .