A decoupled question-conditioned image editor trained via supervised imitation then VLM-reward enhancement improves MLLM visual reasoning Pass@1 by 4.6-5.5 points across models and tasks.
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Large Language Models Cannot Self-Correct Reasoning Yet
Canonical reference. 88% of citing Pith papers cite this work as background.
abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as a groundbreaking technology with their unparalleled text generation capabilities across various applications. Nevertheless, concerns persist regarding the accuracy and appropriateness of their generated content. A contemporary methodology, self-correction, has been proposed as a remedy to these issues. Building upon this premise, this paper critically examines the role and efficacy of self-correction within LLMs, shedding light on its true potential and limitations. Central to our investigation is the notion of intrinsic self-correction, whereby an LLM attempts to correct its initial responses based solely on its inherent capabilities, without the crutch of external feedback. In the context of reasoning, our research indicates that LLMs struggle to self-correct their responses without external feedback, and at times, their performance even degrades after self-correction. Drawing from these insights, we offer suggestions for future research and practical applications in this field.
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representative citing papers
LinAlg-Bench shows LLMs switch from execution errors to computational abandonment and structured fabrication at 4x4 matrix scale, indicating a working memory limit rather than knowledge gaps.
AgentForesight introduces an online auditor model that predicts decisive errors in multi-agent trajectories at the earliest step using a coarse-to-fine reinforcement learning recipe on a new curated dataset AFTraj-2K.
AgentPSO evolves reusable multi-agent reasoning skills via PSO-inspired natural-language updates, outperforming static agents and test-time multi-agent baselines on math and general reasoning tasks with cross-benchmark transfer.
Structured critic-actor loops improve AI performance on theoretical physics reasoning tasks, with benefits strongest in asymmetric model pairings using constructive feedback.
In 30-step recursive LLM loops, append-mode persistent escape from source basins reaches 50% near 400 tokens under full history but plateaus below 50% under tail-clip memory policy, while replace-mode switching largely reflects state reset.
Homogeneous multi-agent debate introduces sycophantic conformity, contextual fragility, and consensus collapse, leading to equal or lower accuracy than isolated self-correction at 2.1-3.4x higher token cost on GSM-Hard and MMLU-Hard.
A model-agnostic Geometric Risk Controller reduces extreme errors in VLM-based OCR by requiring cross-view consensus before accepting outputs.
ProCrit proposes a Proposal-Critic framework that synthesizes process-level annotations via agentic rollout and uses draft-critique-revise with mutual-refinement RL to improve multimodal sarcasm detection.
Stage-Audit raises source-frontier precision from 0.356 to 0.505 and F1 from 0.334 to 0.451 on a 51-instance cross-domain set by enforcing disjoint write rights and row-level source gates.
OEP poisons self-evolving LLM agents by constructing clean edge-case experiences that appear locally valid yet cause harmful over-generalization during reflection, achieving over 50% attack success rate on GPT-4o agents across three domains.
Introduces Wasserstein equilibrium decoding that improves accuracy and convergence speed for small VLMs on medical VQA benchmarks by using semantic consensus instead of lexical order.
Describes a conceptual agentic prototype for AI translation that operationalizes skopos theory and GEMBA-MQM verification into a four-stage cycle with user dialogue and memory for coherence.
OpenDeepThink uses Bradley-Terry aggregation of LLM pairwise judgments to rank and evolve parallel reasoning traces, improving Gemini 3.1 Pro Codeforces Elo by 405 points over eight rounds.
OPT-BENCH and OPT-Agent evaluate LLM self-optimization in large search spaces, showing stronger models improve via feedback but stay constrained by base capacity and below human performance.
ReFlect is a harness that wraps LLMs to detect and recover from reasoning errors, achieving 7-29 pp gains over direct CoT on long-horizon tasks and improving code patch quality to 82-87%.
Temporal reasoning is not the core bottleneck for LLMs on time-based QA; the real issue is unstructured text-to-event mapping, addressed by a neuro-symbolic system with PIS that reaches 100% accuracy on benchmarks when representations are correct.
Verbal Process Supervision uses structured critiques from stronger models in an iterative loop to improve LLM reasoning, reaching 94.9% on GPQA Diamond and large gains on AIME 2025.
SOCIA-EVO generates statistically consistent simulators by separating structural refinement from parameter calibration via bi-level optimization and falsifying strategies through execution feedback in a Bayesian-weighted playbook.
AI claim verification models rely on salient-constraint shortcuts instead of full compositional reasoning under the closed-world assumption, as revealed by their over-acceptance of claims with supported salient constraints but contradicted non-salient ones.
A framework combining universal AST normalization, hybrid graph-LLM embeddings, and strict execution-grounded validation achieves 89-92% intra-language accuracy and 74-80% cross-language F1 while resolving 70% of vulnerabilities at 12% failure rate.
FACT-E uses controlled perturbations as an instrumental signal to measure intra-chain faithfulness in CoT reasoning and combines it with answer consistency to select trustworthy trajectories.
BEAGLE uses a semi-Markov model, Bayesian knowledge tracing with injected flaws, and decoupled strategy-code actions to make LLM agents produce authentic student learning trajectories that humans cannot distinguish from real data at better than chance level.
LACY is a VLM framework jointly trained on L2A, A2L, and L2C tasks that uses an active augmentation cycle to self-improve robotic manipulation policies, reporting a 56.46% average success rate gain in simulation and real-world experiments.
citing papers explorer
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ETCHR: Editing To Clarify and Harness Reasoning
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LinAlg-Bench: A Forensic Benchmark Revealing Structural Failure Modes in LLM Mathematical Reasoning
LinAlg-Bench shows LLMs switch from execution errors to computational abandonment and structured fabrication at 4x4 matrix scale, indicating a working memory limit rather than knowledge gaps.
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AgentForesight: Online Auditing for Early Failure Prediction in Multi-Agent Systems
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AgentPSO: Evolving Agent Reasoning Skill via Multi-agent Particle Swarm Optimization
AgentPSO evolves reusable multi-agent reasoning skills via PSO-inspired natural-language updates, outperforming static agents and test-time multi-agent baselines on math and general reasoning tasks with cross-benchmark transfer.
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When Does Critique Improve AI-Assisted Theoretical Physics? SCALAR: Structured Critic--Actor Loop for Agentic Reasoning
Structured critic-actor loops improve AI performance on theoretical physics reasoning tasks, with benefits strongest in asymmetric model pairings using constructive feedback.
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Perturbation Dose Responses in Recursive LLM Loops: Raw Switching, Stochastic Floors, and Persistent Escape under Append, Replace, and Dialog Updates
In 30-step recursive LLM loops, append-mode persistent escape from source basins reaches 50% near 400 tokens under full history but plateaus below 50% under tail-clip memory policy, while replace-mode switching largely reflects state reset.
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The Cost of Consensus: Isolated Self-Correction Prevails Over Unguided Homogeneous Multi-Agent Debate
Homogeneous multi-agent debate introduces sycophantic conformity, contextual fragility, and consensus collapse, leading to equal or lower accuracy than isolated self-correction at 2.1-3.4x higher token cost on GSM-Hard and MMLU-Hard.
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From Plausibility to Verifiability: Risk-Controlled Generative OCR with Vision-Language Models
A model-agnostic Geometric Risk Controller reduces extreme errors in VLM-based OCR by requiring cross-view consensus before accepting outputs.
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ProCrit: Self-Elicited Multi-Perspective Reasoning with Critic-Guided Revision for Multimodal Sarcasm Detection
ProCrit proposes a Proposal-Critic framework that synthesizes process-level annotations via agentic rollout and uses draft-critique-revise with mutual-refinement RL to improve multimodal sarcasm detection.
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Stage-Audit: Auditable Source-Frontier Discovery for Cross-Wiki Tables
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OEP: Poisoning Self-Evolving LLM Agents via Locally Correct but Non-Transferable Experiences
OEP poisons self-evolving LLM agents by constructing clean edge-case experiences that appear locally valid yet cause harmful over-generalization during reflection, achieving over 50% attack success rate on GPT-4o agents across three domains.
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Wasserstein Equilibrium Decoding for Reliable Medical Visual Question Answering
Introduces Wasserstein equilibrium decoding that improves accuracy and convergence speed for small VLMs on medical VQA benchmarks by using semantic consensus instead of lexical order.
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Agentic AI Translate: An Agentic Translator Prototype for Translation as Communication Design
Describes a conceptual agentic prototype for AI translation that operationalizes skopos theory and GEMBA-MQM verification into a four-stage cycle with user dialogue and memory for coherence.
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OpenDeepThink: Parallel Reasoning via Bradley-Terry Aggregation
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OPT-BENCH: Evaluating the Iterative Self-Optimization of LLM Agents in Large-Scale Search Spaces
OPT-BENCH and OPT-Agent evaluate LLM self-optimization in large search spaces, showing stronger models improve via feedback but stay constrained by base capacity and below human performance.
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ReFlect: An Effective Harness System for Complex Long-Horizon LLM Reasoning
ReFlect is a harness that wraps LLMs to detect and recover from reasoning errors, achieving 7-29 pp gains over direct CoT on long-horizon tasks and improving code patch quality to 82-87%.
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Temporal Reasoning Is Not the Bottleneck: A Probabilistic Inconsistency Framework for Neuro-Symbolic QA
Temporal reasoning is not the core bottleneck for LLMs on time-based QA; the real issue is unstructured text-to-event mapping, addressed by a neuro-symbolic system with PIS that reaches 100% accuracy on benchmarks when representations are correct.
-
Process Supervision via Verbal Critique Improves Reasoning in Large Language Models
Verbal Process Supervision uses structured critiques from stronger models in an iterative loop to improve LLM reasoning, reaching 94.9% on GPQA Diamond and large gains on AIME 2025.
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SOCIA-EVO: Automated Simulator Construction via Dual-Anchored Bi-Level Optimization
SOCIA-EVO generates statistically consistent simulators by separating structural refinement from parameter calibration via bi-level optimization and falsifying strategies through execution feedback in a Bayesian-weighted playbook.
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When Verification Fails: How Compositionally Infeasible Claims Escape Rejection
AI claim verification models rely on salient-constraint shortcuts instead of full compositional reasoning under the closed-world assumption, as revealed by their over-acceptance of claims with supported salient constraints but contradicted non-salient ones.
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Verify Before You Fix: Agentic Execution Grounding for Trustworthy Cross-Language Code Analysis
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FACT-E: Causality-Inspired Evaluation for Trustworthy Chain-of-Thought Reasoning
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BEAGLE: Behavior-Enforced Agent for Grounded Learner Emulation
BEAGLE uses a semi-Markov model, Bayesian knowledge tracing with injected flaws, and decoupled strategy-code actions to make LLM agents produce authentic student learning trajectories that humans cannot distinguish from real data at better than chance level.
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Training Language Models to Self-Correct via Reinforcement Learning
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From Local to Global: A Graph RAG Approach to Query-Focused Summarization
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LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code
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Math-Shepherd: Verify and Reinforce LLMs Step-by-step without Human Annotations
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ExComm: Exploration-Stage Communication for Error-Resilient Agentic Test-Time Scaling
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Decodable but Not Corrected by Fixed Residual-Stream Linear Steering: Evidence from Medical LLM Failure Regimes
Overthinking in medical QA is linearly decodable at 71.6% accuracy yet fixed residual-stream steering yields no correction across 29 configurations, while enabling selective abstention with AUROC 0.610.
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Multi-Agent Reasoning Improves Compute Efficiency: Pareto-Optimal Test-Time Scaling
Multi-agent debate and mixture-of-agents outperform self-consistency by 1.3 and 2.7 percentage points respectively at equal compute budgets on MMLU-Pro and BBH, with advantages that continue at higher scales while self-consistency saturates.
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ReMedi: Reasoner for Medical Clinical Prediction
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State Representation and Termination for Recursive Reasoning Systems
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Measure Twice, Click Once: Co-evolving Proposer and Visual Critic via Reinforcement Learning for GUI Grounding
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LACE: Lattice Attention for Cross-thread Exploration
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From Hallucination to Structure Snowballing: The Alignment Tax of Constrained Decoding in LLM Reflection
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Understanding Performance Gap Between Parallel and Sequential Sampling in Large Reasoning Models
Lack of exploration from conditioning on prior answers is the primary reason parallel sampling outperforms sequential sampling in large reasoning models.
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Failure Makes the Agent Stronger: Enhancing Accuracy through Structured Reflection for Reliable Tool Interactions
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HalluScan: A Systematic Benchmark for Detecting and Mitigating Hallucinations in Instruction-Following LLMs
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How Many Tries Does It Take? Iterative Self-Repair in LLM Code Generation Across Model Scales and Benchmarks
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IACDM: Interactive Adversarial Convergence Development Methodology -- A Structured Framework for AI-Assisted Software Development
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LLMs-as-Judges: A Comprehensive Survey on LLM-based Evaluation Methods
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