REVIEW 4 major objections 5 minor 34 references
Beyond Passive Critical Thinking: Fostering Proactive Questioning to Enhance Human-AI Collaboration
T0 review · 4 major / 5 minor · reviewed 2026-08-06 · deepseek-v4-flash
Pith's one-line read Proactive critical thinking can be trained into small language models: reinforcement learning with an answerability reward lifts Qwen3-1.7B from 0.15% to 73.98% accuracy on incomplete math problems.
desk verdict A well-motivated training recipe for proactive questioning whose headline numbers rest on a self-referential user-simulator and need verification. read the letter →
The pith
A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.
The reading
What carries the argument
The mechanism that carries the argument is an answerability-conditioned reward heuristic added to GRPO, an on-policy RL algorithm in which a group of rollouts are scored and advantages are normalized per group. Each rollout is a two-turn interaction: model request, simulated user reply, and final answer. The heuristic gives $+0.5$ for requesting missing information on unanswerable questions and $-0.5$ for making requests on answerable questions, making the sparse correctness signal denser and accelerating convergence. The same answerability information is used as a prompt-level hint during SFT data collection. The benchmarks GSM-MC (1,368 problems) and GSM-MCE (1,134 with injected distractors) are the measuring instruments, and the DeepSeek-V3-based user agent is what turns the interactive setting into a scalable automatic evaluation.
What would settle it
Present the trained model with a user agent or human who does not reply with the missing value verbatim—for example, answering 'I don't know' or providing a related but different quantity—and measure whether the model still reaches the correct answer. If accuracy collapses under such replies, the capability is an artifact of the scripted user agent rather than robust proactive critical thinking.
Extended reading notes
Core claim
The paper's central claim is that proactive critical thinking—identifying a missing piece of information and asking for it—is a distinct skill that can be instilled through training. The authors remove a key variable from each GSM8K problem, rephrase the question fluently, and filter for quality using DeepSeek-V3, producing GSM-MC and GSM-MCE. On top of standard SFT and on-policy GRPO reinforcement learning, they add a heuristic answerability reward: for unanswerable questions the model receives $+0.5$ for making a clarification request, and for answerable questions it receives $-0.5$ for making an unnecessary request, layered on the sparse $+1/0$ final-answer correctness reward. Trained models learn to identify the missing variable, phrase a request, incorporate the user's reply, and produce the correct final answer, reaching 73.98% ACC on GSM-MC for Qwen3-1.7B with thinking enabled, up from 0.15% for the vanilla model. The paper also reports that RL turns the thinking mode from a liability into an asset, preserves GSM8K accuracy, improves out-of-distribution performance on MIP-MATH, and extends to multi-turn dialogues.
Load-bearing premise
The load-bearing premise is that the scripted DeepSeek-V3 user agent—prompted with the original, unmodified question—always replies with exactly the missing value the model asks for, so the measured accuracy reflects genuine proactive collaboration rather than imitation of that scripted exchange.
Editorial extensions
If this is right
- Small models (1.7B–3B) can acquire proactive critical thinking through RL, narrowing the gap with much larger models on this capability.
- The answerability reward accelerates RL convergence compared with sparse outcome rewards, so similar reward shaping could be applied to other interactive tasks that require a question-asking step.
- RL-trained models retain and sometimes improve standard GSM8K accuracy, suggesting proactive questioning does not trade away basic math competence.
- The trained skill transfers to an out-of-distribution unanswerable benchmark (MIP-MATH) and to multi-turn conversations, indicating generalization beyond the training distribution.
- After RL, enabling the thinking mode improves performance, reversing the pattern in vanilla models where thinking mode hurt performance.
Reading between the lines
- If the measured behavior is driven by imitation of the scripted user agent, real human-AI collaboration may require training against more varied and less cooperative user responses; the paper's single-turn scripted agent likely understates that challenge.
- The answerability-reward heuristic should transfer to other domains, such as clinical triage or tool use, where the cost of an unnecessary clarification differs; a natural test is to apply the same shaping to a medical question-answering dataset.
- The magnitude of the gain (0.15% to 73.98%) suggests the benchmark is gameable: a model that always asks for more information and then echoes the user agent's reply would score well, so a harder benchmark should penalize requests that a real user cannot answer or that do not narrow down the problem.
Editorial analysis
A structured set of objections, weighed in public.
Referee Report
Summary. The paper proposes 'proactive critical thinking' as a paradigm in which an LLM detects missing information in a user query and asks a targeted clarifying question instead of merely refusing or producing a wrong answer. It introduces two benchmarks, GSM-MC and GSM-MCE, derived from GSM8K by removing one key variable and (for GSM-MCE) adding irrelevant details, with a sampling-based filtering pipeline built on DeepSeek-V3. The authors then train small language models with supervised fine-tuning and GRPO-based reinforcement learning, augmented with answerability heuristics as dense rewards and SFT data conditioning. Their central quantitative claim is that Qwen3-1.7B's accuracy on GSM-MC rises from 0.15% (vanilla) to 73.98% (SFT+RL), with consistent gains across model families and thinking modes. They also report a transfer experiment on MIP-MATH and a multi-turn extension.
Significance. If the reported gains hold under human-like interaction, the paper would be a useful step toward making LLMs genuinely collaborative when input is incomplete. The benchmarks are a concrete resource, and the ablations on data filtering and heuristic guidance provide useful evidence about which design choices matter. The MIP-MATH transfer and multi-turn results are encouraging attempts to test generalization. However, the headline metric relies on a simulated user agent that has access to the original full question, which may overstate the model's ability to identify missing information from a real user's perspective. The absence of error bars further weakens the quantitative claims. Overall, the contribution is significant but requires substantial additional validation before the central claim can be accepted.
major comments (4)
- [Section 3, Appendix A] The user-agent protocol supplies the original unmodified question and instructs the agent to output only the relevant parts about the requested information, returning 'None' only if the information is absent. Since every GSM-MC item has exactly one removed variable, any clarification request that names the variable role (e.g., 'the price of the first glass') will yield the exact value with no reasoning on the model's part. The reported ACC may therefore measure the model's ability to elicit a value from a permissive extractor rather than its ability to identify the missing premise and ask a human-understandable, sufficiently specific question. I recommend adding a human evaluation, or a user model without access to the original question, on a random subset to validate the metric and the headline 73.98% figure.
- [Section 4, Sampling-Based Filtering] The filtering thresholds (removing items where more than 12 of 16 sampled solutions answer directly, removing items where more than 12 of 16 are resolved in the second turn, and discarding items that fail all 16 attempts) appear arbitrary, and no sensitivity analysis is reported. More importantly, the filter is run with DeepSeek-V3 as both the solver and the user agent, and the same model family is later used as the test-time user agent. This creates a closed calibration loop: benchmark items are retained precisely when DeepSeek-V3's simulated interaction can resolve them. The authors should report robustness to the thresholds and should ideally use a different model for filtering than for test-time simulation.
- [Table 2 and Section 6.2] All results in Table 2 are from single runs with no standard deviations or multiple seeds. This undermines comparative claims such as the statement that for Qwen3-8B 'RL alone surpasses the performance of two-stage training,' which rests on gaps like 81.73 vs. 79.24 (w/o think) and 85.53 vs. 83.11 (w/ think) on GSM-MC; these are within the range of typical RL run-to-run variation. Please report means and standard deviations over at least three seeds for all core configurations.
- [Section 6.3.3 and 6.3.4] The MIP-MATH generalization experiment and the multi-turn expansion experiment use the same DeepSeek-V3 user-agent protocol in which the user agent has the original unmodified question in context. They therefore do not break the circularity identified above; the multi-turn improvement may simply reflect more chances to elicit a value from the permissive extractor. A transfer evaluation with a different user model, or with human annotators, is needed to support the claim that the learned skill generalizes to realistic human-AI collaboration.
minor comments (5)
- [References] In the reference to Rahman et al. (2024), 'logical interity' should be 'logical integrity'.
- [Equation (2)] The symbol q is overloaded: earlier in the paper q denotes the clarification question, but in the RL objective the policy input is the original user question. Please use separate symbols to avoid confusion.
- [Table 2] The caption should define 'w/ think' and 'w/o think' (thinking mode enabled/disabled) and state that ACC for GSM-MC and GSM-MCE is measured on the second-turn response, as described in Section 6.1.1.
- [Section 4] The relationship between GSM-MC (1,368 items) and GSM-MCE (1,134 items) is not explained; after irrelevant-information injection, some items presumably fail the second filtering stage. Please state the pass rate and criteria that reduce the size.
- [Overall availability] The paper does not mention a release plan or URL for the GSM-MC and GSM-MCE datasets or the training code. Since the benchmarks are a central contribution, a release statement should be included.
Circularity Check
No significant circularity: the trained-model gains are empirical benchmark results, and the DeepSeek-V3 user-agent coupling is an external-validity caveat, not a circular derivation.
full rationale
Walking the paper's derivation chain, I find no step where a prediction or first-principles result reduces to its inputs by construction. The central claim, improving Qwen3-1.7B accuracy on GSM-MC from 0.15% to 73.98%, is an empirical outcome measured on a held-out benchmark after training; it is not a fitted parameter renamed as a prediction, nor is the benchmark score defined in terms of the model's own outputs. The benchmark construction pipeline uses DeepSeek-V3 for variable removal, filtering, and user-agent simulation, which makes the task easier and raises legitimate external-validity concerns about transfer to real human users, but it does not make the trained model's accuracy equivalent to the construction inputs. The user-agent prompt (Appendix A) provides the unmodified original question so that the simulated user can answer clarification requests, and the filtering criterion retains cases resolvable by DeepSeek-V3; however, vanilla Qwen3-1.7B still scores 0.15% on this same setup, showing the metric is not forced by construction. The out-of-distribution MIP-MATH evaluation is an external benchmark from other authors and partially breaks the dependency. Self-citations in the paper (e.g., Lin et al. 2025, Wang et al. 2025a/b, Shao et al. 2025) appear only as related-work context and are not load-bearing for the central claim. Under the specified standards, this is a non-circular empirical study with a benchmark-validity caveat rather than a circular derivation.
Assumptions & free parameters
free parameters (4)
- Heuristic reward weights =
+0.5 for requests on unanswerable, -0.5 for unnecessary requests, 0 otherwise
- Filtering thresholds =
12 out of 16 cases
- Number of samples for filtering =
16
- Training hyperparameters =
SFT lr=5e-6, RL lr=1e-6, rollouts=8, 1 epoch, warmup 10%
assumptions (4)
- domain assumption The DeepSeek-V3 user agent correctly extracts the exact missing value from the original question when the model asks for it, and never infers or calculates the value.
- domain assumption The filtering pipeline using DeepSeek-V3 yields a set of questions that are truly unanswerable first-turn and resolvable in one clarification request.
- standard math The original GSM8K answers are correct ground truth.
- domain assumption Second-turn response accuracy, after the user agent provides the missing detail, measures proactive critical thinking quality.
Cite this review
Pith. "Pith review of Beyond Passive Critical Thinking: Fostering Proactive Questioning to Enhance Human-AI Collaboration." pith.science (2026). https://pith.science/paper/V3EUF5BX
@misc{pith2026250723407,
author = {Pith},
title = {Pith review of: Beyond Passive Critical Thinking: Fostering Proactive Questioning to Enhance Human-AI Collaboration},
year = {2026},
howpublished = {\url{https://pith.science/paper/V3EUF5BX}},
note = {Machine review of arXiv:2507.23407}
}
read the original abstract
Critical thinking is essential for building robust AI systems, preventing them from blindly accepting flawed data or biased reasoning. However, prior work has primarily focused on passive critical thinking, where models simply reject problematic queries without taking constructive steps to address user requests. In this work, we introduce proactive critical thinking, a paradigm where models actively seek missing or clarifying information from users to resolve their queries better. To evaluate this capability, we present GSM-MC and GSM-MCE, two novel benchmarks based on GSM8K for assessing mathematical reasoning under incomplete or misleading conditions. GSM-MC contains 1,368 math problems with a key variable deliberately removed, requiring models to identify and request the missing information. GSM-MCE further increases the difficulty by introducing irrelevant details to test robustness against distractions. Experiments on Qwen3 and Llama series models show that, while these models excel in traditional reasoning tasks due to extensive post-training and inference-time scaling, they struggle with proactive critical thinking, especially smaller ones. However, we demonstrate that reinforcement learning (RL) can significantly improve this ability. Using our enhanced RL algorithm, we achieve substantial gains, boosting the Qwen3-1.7B's accuracy from 0.15% to 73.98% on GSM-MC. We hope this work advances models that collaborate more effectively with users in problem-solving through proactive critical thinking.
Figures
Reference graph
Works this paper leans on
-
[1]
online" 'onlinestring :=
ENTRY address archivePrefix author booktitle chapter edition editor eid eprint eprinttype howpublished institution journal key month note number organization pages publisher school series title type volume year doi pubmed url lastchecked label extra.label sort.label short.list INTEGERS output.state before.all mid.sentence after.sentence after.block STRING...
-
[2]
write newline
" write newline "" before.all 'output.state := FUNCTION n.dashify 't := "" t empty not t #1 #1 substring "-" = t #1 #2 substring "--" = not "--" * t #2 global.max substring 't := t #1 #1 substring "-" = "-" * t #2 global.max substring 't := while if t #1 #1 substring * t #2 global.max substring 't := if while FUNCTION word.in bbl.in capitalize " " * FUNCT...
-
[3]
Azza Alkaabi and Deena Elsori. 2025. Navigating digital frontiers in uae healthcare: A qualitative exploration of healthcare professionals’ and patients’ experiences with ai and telemedicine. PLOS Digital Health, 4(4):e0000586
work page 2025
-
[4]
Chinmaya Andukuri, Jan-Philipp Fr \"a nken, Tobias Gerstenberg, and Noah D Goodman. 2024. Star-gate: Teaching language models to ask clarifying questions. arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.19154
arXiv 2024
-
[5]
Karl Cobbe, Vineet Kosaraju, Mohammad Bavarian, Mark Chen, Heewoo Jun, Lukasz Kaiser, Matthias Plappert, Jerry Tworek, Jacob Hilton, Reiichiro Nakano, Christopher Hesse, and John Schulman. 2021. Training verifiers to solve math word problems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2110.14168
arXiv 2021
-
[6]
Yihong Dong, Xue Jiang, Zhi Jin, and Ge Li. 2024. Self-collaboration code generation via chatgpt. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 33(7):1--38
work page 2024
-
[7]
Chenrui Fan, Ming Li, Lichao Sun, and Tianyi Zhou. 2025. Missing premise exacerbates overthinking: Are reasoning models losing critical thinking skill? arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.06514
arXiv 2025
-
[8]
Yunhe Feng, Sreecharan Vanam, Manasa Cherukupally, Weijian Zheng, Meikang Qiu, and Haihua Chen. 2023. Investigating code generation performance of chatgpt with crowdsourcing social data. In 2023 IEEE 47th Annual Computers, Software, and Applications Conference (COMPSAC), pages 876--885. IEEE
2023
Show all 34 references
-
[9]
Dan Hendrycks, Collin Burns, Saurav Kadavath, Akul Arora, Steven Basart, Eric Tang, Dawn Song, and Jacob Steinhardt. 2021. https://datasets-benchmarks-proceedings.neurips.cc/paper_files/paper/2021/file/be83ab3ecd0db773eb2dc1b0a17836a1-Paper-round2.pdf Measuring mathematical pr...
2021
-
[10]
Shima IMANI, Harsh Shrivastava, and Liang Du. 2024. Mathematical reasoning using large language models. US Patent App. 18/144,802
2024
-
[11]
Yoonsu Kim, Jueon Lee, Seoyoung Kim, Jaehyuk Park, and Juho Kim. 2024. Understanding users’ dissatisfaction with chatgpt responses: Types, resolving tactics, and the effect of knowledge level. In Proceedings of the 29th International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, ...
2024
-
[12]
Polina Kirichenko, Mark Ibrahim, Kamalika Chaudhuri, and Samuel J Bell. 2025. Abstentionbench: Reasoning llms fail on unanswerable questions. arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.09038
2025 arXiv
-
[13]
Lorenz Kuhn, Yarin Gal, and Sebastian Farquhar. 2022. Clam: Selective clarification for ambiguous questions with generative language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2212.07769
2022 arXiv
-
[14]
Qintong Li, Leyang Cui, Xueliang Zhao, Lingpeng Kong, and Wei Bi. 2024. Gsm-plus: A comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the robustness of llms as mathematical problem solvers. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume...
2024
- [15]
-
[16]
Yujie Lin, Ante Wang, Moye Chen, Jingyao Liu, Hao Liu, Jinsong Su, and Xinyan Xiao. 2025. https://aclanthology.org/2025.findings-acl.808/ Investigating inference-time scaling for chain of multi-modal thought: A preliminary study . In Findings of the Association for Computation...
2025
-
[17]
Aixin Liu, Bei Feng, Bing Xue, Bingxuan Wang, Bochao Wu, Chengda Lu, Chenggang Zhao, Chengqi Deng, Chenyu Zhang, Chong Ruan, et al. 2024. Deepseek-v3 technical report. arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.19437
2024 arXiv
-
[18]
Jingyuan Ma, Damai Dai, Zihang Yuan, Weilin Luo, Bin Wang, Qun Liu, Lei Sha, Zhifang Sui, et al. 2024. Large language models struggle with unreasonability in math problems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2403.19346
2024 arXiv
-
[19]
AI Meta. 2024. Llama 3.2: Revolutionizing edge ai and vision with open, customizable models. Meta AI Blog. Retrieved December, 20:2024
2024
-
[20]
AM Rahman, Junyi Ye, Wei Yao, Sierra S Liu, Jesse Yu, Jonathan Yu, Wenpeng Yin, and Guiling Wang. 2024. From blind solvers to logical thinkers: Benchmarking llms' logical interity on faulty mathematical problems. arXiv preprint arXiv:2410.18921
2024 arXiv
-
[21]
Liangying Shao, Yanfu Yan, Denys Poshyvanyk, and Jinsong Su. 2025. https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE-NIER66352.2025.00020 Unigencoder: Merging seq2seq and seq2tree paradigms for unified code generation . In 2025 IEEE/ACM 47th International Conference on Software Engineering: New Id...
2025
-
[22]
Zhihong Shao, Peiyi Wang, Qihao Zhu, Runxin Xu, Junxiao Song, Xiao Bi, Haowei Zhang, Mingchuan Zhang, YK Li, Yang Wu, et al. 2024. Deepseekmath: Pushing the limits of mathematical reasoning in open language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2402.03300
2024 arXiv
-
[23]
Linxin Song, Taiwei Shi, and Jieyu Zhao. 2025. The hallucination tax of reinforcement finetuning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.13988
2025 arXiv
-
[24]
YuHong Sun, Zhangyue Yin, Qipeng Guo, Jiawen Wu, Xipeng Qiu, and Hui Zhao. 2024. Benchmarking hallucination in large language models based on unanswerable math word problem. In Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resour...
2024
-
[25]
Ante Wang, Linfeng Song, Ye Tian, Baolin Peng, Dian Yu, Haitao Mi, Jinsong Su, and Dong Yu. 2025 a . Litesearch: Efficient tree search with dynamic exploration budget for math reasoning. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, volume 39, pages 25318--25326
2025
-
[26]
Wenxuan Wang, Juluan Shi, Zixuan Ling, Yuk-Kit Chan, Chaozheng Wang, Cheryl Lee, Youliang Yuan, Jen-tse Huang, Wenxiang Jiao, and Michael R Lyu. 2024. Learning to ask: When llm agents meet unclear instruction. arXiv preprint arXiv:2409.00557
2024 arXiv
-
[27]
Yaoxiang Wang, Haoling Li, Xin Zhang, Jie Wu, Xiao Liu, Wenxiang Hu, Zhongxin Guo, Yangyu Huang, Ying Xin, Yujiu Yang, Jinsong Su, Qi Chen, and Scarlett Li. 2025 b . https://openreview.net/forum?id=RAxe7nF4Oz Epicoder: Encompassing diversity and complexity in code generation ....
2025
-
[28]
Shirley Wu, Michel Galley, Baolin Peng, Hao Cheng, Gavin Li, Yao Dou, Weixin Cai, James Zou, Jure Leskovec, and Jianfeng Gao. 2025. https://openreview.net/forum?id=DmH4HHVb3y Collab LLM : From passive responders to active collaborators . In Forty-second International Conferenc...
2025
-
[29]
Ryutaro Yamauchi, Sho Sonoda, Akiyoshi Sannai, and Wataru Kumagai. 2023. Lpml: llm-prompting markup language for mathematical reasoning. arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.13078
2023 arXiv
-
[30]
An Yang, Anfeng Li, Baosong Yang, Beichen Zhang, Binyuan Hui, Bo Zheng, Bowen Yu, Chang Gao, Chengen Huang, Chenxu Lv, et al. 2025. Qwen3 technical report. arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.09388
2025 arXiv
-
[31]
Shunyu Yao, Dian Yu, Jeffrey Zhao, Izhak Shafran, Tom Griffiths, Yuan Cao, and Karthik Narasimhan. 2023. Tree of thoughts: Deliberate problem solving with large language models. Advances in neural information processing systems, 36:11809--11822
2023
-
[32]
J Diego Zamfirescu-Pereira, Richmond Y Wong, Bjoern Hartmann, and Qian Yang. 2023. Why johnny can’t prompt: how non-ai experts try (and fail) to design llm prompts. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems, pages 1--21
2023
-
[33]
Bradley Knox, and Eunsol Choi
Michael JQ Zhang, W. Bradley Knox, and Eunsol Choi. 2025. https://openreview.net/forum?id=cwuSAR7EKd Modeling future conversation turns to teach LLM s to ask clarifying questions . In The Thirteenth International Conference on Learning Representations
2025
-
[34]
Zhehua Zhou, Jiayang Song, Kunpeng Yao, Zhan Shu, and Lei Ma. 2024. Isr-llm: Iterative self-refined large language model for long-horizon sequential task planning. In 2024 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA), pages 2081--2088. IEEE
2024
Reviewed August 6, 2026 · model on record in the stance chip above.
Discussion (0). Sign in to comment.