Improving Human Verification of LLM Reasoning through Interactive Explanation Interfaces

The reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) have led to their increasing employment in several critical applications, particularly education, where they support problem-solving, tutoring, and personalized study. While there are a plethora of works showing the effectiveness of LLMs in generating step-by-step solutions through chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning on reasoning benchmarks, little is understood about whether the generated CoT is helpful for end-users in improving their ability to comprehend mathematical reasoning problems and detect errors/hallucinations in LLM-generated solutions. To address this gap and contribute to understanding how reasoning can improve human-AI interaction, we present three new interactive reasoning interfaces: interactive CoT (iCoT), interactive Program-of-Thought (iPoT), and interactive Graph (iGraph), and a novel framework that generates the LLM's reasoning from traditional CoT to alternative, interactive formats. Across 125 participants, we found that interactive interfaces significantly improved performance. Specifically, the iGraph interface yielded the highest clarity and error detection rate (85.6 %), followed by iPoT (82.5 %), iCoT (80.6 %), all outperforming standard CoT (73.5 %). Interactive interfaces also led to faster response times, where participants using iGraph were fastest (57.9 secs), compared to iCoT and iPoT (60 secs), and the standard CoT baseline (64.7 secs). Furthermore, participants preferred the iGraph reasoning interface, citing its superior ability to enable users to follow the LLM's reasoning process. We discuss the implications of these results and provide recommendations for the future design of reasoning models. The code and interfaces for this project can be found here: https://github.com/Runtaozhou/Interactive-CoT.