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Rethinking Reflection in Pre-Training

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arxiv 2504.04022 v1 pith:XN7DDASU submitted 2025-04-05 cs.CL cs.AI

classification cs.CLcs.AI
keywords modelabilitypre-trainingduringacrossactuallyadvantageanswer
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal

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A language model's ability to reflect on its own reasoning provides a key advantage for solving complex problems. While most recent research has focused on how this ability develops during reinforcement learning, we show that it actually begins to emerge much earlier - during the model's pre-training. To study this, we introduce deliberate errors into chains-of-thought and test whether the model can still arrive at the correct answer by recognizing and correcting these mistakes. By tracking performance across different stages of pre-training, we observe that this self-correcting ability appears early and improves steadily over time. For instance, an OLMo2-7B model pre-trained on 4 trillion tokens displays self-correction on our six self-reflection tasks.

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Forward citations

Cited by 16 Pith papers

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

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  3. GThinker: Towards General Multimodal Reasoning via Cue-Guided Rethinking

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    A cue-tagging and rethinking training recipe lifts a 7B multimodal model to 81.5% on M3CoT, though the gain may reflect training on the same benchmark.

  4. J1: Exploring Simple Test-Time Scaling for LLM-as-a-Judge

    cs.LG 2025-05 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    J1-7B, a judge LLM trained with supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, improves when forced to reflect with 'wait' tokens, and the scaling ability emerges during the RL phase.

  5. Natural Language Reinforcement Learning

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    NLRL replaces scalar RL values with LLM-generated language narratives, trains language critics with language MC/TD, and improves policies via LLM-based policy iteration, outperforming PPO on four small agentic tasks.

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    A plan-then-reason SFT plus a plan-quality reward in GRPO improves math-reasoning accuracy by small but consistent margins over GRPO and DAPO.

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  9. REST: Stress Testing Large Reasoning Models by Asking Multiple Problems at Once

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    Asking a reasoning model several problems at once reveals large accuracy drops and exposes differences that single-question benchmarks miss.

  10. Efficient Reasoning Through Suppression of Self-Affirmation Reflections in Large Reasoning Models

    cs.CL 2025-06 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    Suppressing low-probability 'wait' tokens that trigger self-affirmation reflections shortens reasoning-model output by 8-18% with roughly unchanged accuracy.

  11. From Emergence to Control: Probing and Modulating Self-Reflection in Language Models

    cs.LG 2025-06 reject novelty 5.0 of 10

    Self-reflection in LLMs can be steered up or down by a single activation-space vector, improving accuracy when amplified and cutting output length when suppressed.

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    GUI-Reflection trains an 8B multimodal GUI agent to recognize mistakes, undo incorrect actions, and retry, improving AndroidWorld success rate from 14.58% (filtered BC baseline) to 34.72% with reflection data and onli...

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  16. Reinforcement Learning Meets Large Language Models: A Survey of Advancements and Applications Across the LLM Lifecycle

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    A survey that maps reinforcement learning methods, datasets, benchmarks, and open-source tools across the full training lifecycle of large language models, focusing on verifiable-reward reasoning.

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