Reasoning is central to a wide range of intellectual activities, and while the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) continue to advance, their performance in reasoning tasks remains limited. The processes and mechanisms underlying reasoning are not yet fully understood, but key elements include path exploration, selection of relevant knowledge, and multi-step inference. Problems are solved through the synthesis of these components. In this paper, we propose a benchmark that focuses on a specific aspect of reasoning ability: the direct evaluation of multi-step inference. To this end, we design a special reasoning task where multi-step inference is specifically focused by largely eliminating path exploration and implicit knowledge utilization. Our dataset comprises pairs of explicit instructions and corresponding questions, where the procedures necessary for solving the questions are entirely detailed within the instructions. This setup allows models to solve problems solely by following the provided directives. By constructing problems that require varying numbers of steps to solve and evaluating responses at each step, we enable a thorough assessment of state-of-the-art LLMs' ability to follow instructions. To ensure the robustness of our evaluation, we include multiple distinct tasks. Furthermore, by comparing accuracy across tasks, utilizing step-aware metrics, and applying separately defined measures of complexity, we conduct experiments that offer insights into the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in reasoning tasks. Our findings have significant implications for the development of LLMs and highlight areas for future research in advancing their reasoning abilities. Our dataset is available at \url{https://huggingface.co/datasets/ifujisawa/procbench} and code at \url{https://github.com/ifujisawa/proc-bench}.

本研究解决了大型语言模型在推理任务中的性能限制问题。我们提出了一种新的基准，专注于多步骤推理的直接评估，通过设计明确的指令和对应问题对，来检验模型的指令遵循能力。研究发现提供的指令可显著提高大型语言模型在推理任务中的表现，为未来研究指明了方向。

ProcBench：多步骤推理和程序跟随的基准