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Small Language Models Need Strong Verifiers to Self-Correct Reasoning

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arxiv 2404.17140 v2 pith:GPY3QQDI submitted 2024-04-26 cs.CL

Small Language Models Need Strong Verifiers to Self-Correct Reasoning

classification cs.CL
keywords modelsreasoningself-correctionlanguagewhenabilitiescorrectcritiques
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Self-correction has emerged as a promising solution to boost the reasoning performance of large language models (LLMs), where LLMs refine their solutions using self-generated critiques that pinpoint the errors. This work explores whether small (<= 13B) language models (LMs) have the ability of self-correction on reasoning tasks with minimal inputs from stronger LMs. We propose a novel pipeline that prompts smaller LMs to collect self-correction data that supports the training of self-refinement abilities. First, we leverage correct solutions to guide the model in critiquing their incorrect responses. Second, the generated critiques, after filtering, are used for supervised fine-tuning of the self-correcting reasoner through solution refinement. Our experimental results show improved self-correction abilities of two models on five datasets spanning math and commonsense reasoning, with notable performance gains when paired with a strong GPT-4-based verifier, though limitations are identified when using a weak self-verifier for determining when to correct.

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Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Denoising Iterative Self-Correction: Structured Verification Loops for Reliable LLM Reasoning

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    DISC is a new iterative verify-judge-correct procedure for LLMs that improves accuracy on reasoning benchmarks by modeling verification as denoising signals and using a gate to control correction precision.

  2. Post Reasoning: Improving the Performance of Non-Thinking Models at No Cost

    cs.AI 2026-05 conditional novelty 7.0

    Post-Reasoning boosts LLM accuracy by reversing the usual answer-after-reasoning order, delivering mean relative gains of 17.37% across 117 model-benchmark pairs with zero extra cost.

  3. Training Language Models to Self-Correct via Reinforcement Learning

    cs.LG 2024-09 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    SCoRe uses multi-turn online RL with regularization on self-generated traces to improve LLM self-correction, achieving 15.6% and 9.1% gains on MATH and HumanEval for Gemini models.

  4. Measure Twice, Click Once: Co-evolving Proposer and Visual Critic via Reinforcement Learning for GUI Grounding

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    A co-evolving proposer-critic RL framework improves GUI grounding accuracy by letting the model critique its own proposals rendered on screenshots.

  5. Learning to Pose Problems: Reasoning-Driven and Solver-Adaptive Data Synthesis

    cs.AI 2025-11 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    A reasoning-driven problem generator plans synthesis directions with CoT and uses solver performance feedback to adapt difficulty, producing complementary problems that yield a 3.4% average improvement across 10 reaso...

  6. Stop Overthinking: A Survey on Efficient Reasoning for Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-03 accept novelty 5.0

    A survey organizing techniques to achieve efficient reasoning in LLMs by shortening chain-of-thought outputs.