Measuring the Unmeasurable: Unveiling Latent Cognitive Capabilities of LLM

Abstract

As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in high-stakes domains such as education, healthcare, and law, accurately evaluating their nuanced reasoning process becomes essential to ensure their safety, reliability, and trustworthiness. However, most existing benchmarks evaluate LLMs at a coarse granularity. Current benchmarks lack a unified framework and rely on single‐task datasets, overlooking the intermediate steps of complex reasoning. This results in redundant overlap across benchmarks, poor generalization to multifaceted real-world tasks, and underutilizes the rich reasoning traces generated by advanced LLMs.