Democratizing data access through natural language is a crucial goal for modern enterprises, but the practical adoption of Text-to-SQL is critically hindered by real-world complexities: 1. Obscure and large database schemas, 2. Ineffective retrieval of relevant tables and columns due to structured setting of schemas and vague user query, 3. Generation of syntactically or logically flawed SQL due to a lack of robust validation and correction mechanism. To address these systemic challenges, we introduce Reflect-SQL, a novel framework for Text to SQL, grounded in multi-stage self-reflection approach to develop understanding of obscure schema using a knowledge base, setup a process for effective retrieval and system to generate syntactically/semantically SQL. Instead of a single-pass attempt, our system employs an LLM-as-a-judge driven scoring mechanism within interconnected feedback loops to iteratively refine the results at every stage. A feedback-driven retrieval loop refines the user's natural language query, while a synthesis loop validates and corrects the SQL and finally, an entailment loop optimizes the end-to-end process and continuously enriches the knowledge base. By integrating these layers of reflection, Reflect-SQL bridges the critical gap between user intent and complex data. On the challenging BIRD benchmark, our framework achieves an execution accuracy of 72.03%, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art baselines, demonstrating a major leap in reliability for enterprise applications.
Multi-agent systems (MAS) powered by large language models have shown promise for complex tasks but suffer from high failure rates. Current self-reflection methods for MAS require all agents to reflect upon failure, overlooking a critical reality: failures typically stem from a specific agent leading the task astray, namely the decisive error agent, while others merely fulfill their regular duties. Forcing regular-behaving agents to reflect contaminates their memory with wrong insights. Hence, we propose DoCtOR (Diagnose-then-Correct PPO-enhanced Reflection), a novel reflection framework that enhances multi-agent collaboration. DoCtOR first identifies the decisive error step and decisive error agent through automated failure attribution, then employs counterfactual reasoning to generate a corrected decisive error step, and finally engages only the decisive error agent to produce targeted reflections. Experimental results show DoCtOR achieves 22%, 26%, and 27% improvements over initial success rates on HotPotQA, ChartQAPro, and Mind2Web datasets, outperforming Reflexion, Retroformer, and COPPER. We further establish the generalizability of our diagnose-then-correct paradigm and demonstrate that in low-resource settings, focusing reflection on reasoning steps after the decisive error step achieves comparable quality to reflecting on the complete failure trajectory.
Self-reflection is a powerful mechanism for credit assignment in human learning, converting sparse outcome feedback into actionable guidance. However, its potential for post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) remains underexplored. We propose Self-Reflective Policy Optimization (SRPO), a framework that internalizes this capability. SRPO enables LLMs to analyze their own completed trajectories, synthesize errors into concise "reflection patches," and use reflection-conditioned teacher scores on student on-policy rollouts as dense token-level training signals. This process effectively transforms sparse terminal supervision into dense, token-level learning signals without requiring external critics, separate reward models, or larger teacher models. We demonstrate that SRPO achieves state-of-the-art performance across mathematical reasoning and long-horizon agentic benchmarks with exceptional data efficiency. Using a Qwen3-8B base model, SRPO attains 73.3% on AIME'24 using only 8% (0.08x) of the training FLOPs required by scaled supervised fine-tuning, while significantly improving success rates on WebShop (64.7%), ALFWorld (76.8%), and SWE-Bench-Lite (31.2%). Code is available at https://github.com/Galleons2029/SRPO
Reinforcement-learning training of reasoning LLMs (e.g., GRPO) is expensive and requires a controllable environment, committing every contribution to a full training pipeline. We present EvoResearcher, a training-free, inference-time protocol that adds cost-bounded self-reflection to a single frozen LLM backbone. The protocol iterates generate -> self-critique -> revise until a maximum depth D is reached or the critique returns the CONFIRMED sentinel, an implicit early stop that lets the backbone self-verify its answer under a strict compute budget. Four self-reflective meta-reward components (correctness, efficiency, reflection depth, tool-call diversity) act as design principles instantiated as prompt-level mechanisms, so their benefits accrue with zero gradient updates. We validate the protocol on Big-Bench Hard (100 questions) and establish cross-domain behavior on GSM8K (500) and MATH (500) on the same frozen backbone, with cross-model replication on Qwen2.5-72B. All experiments use pure-reasoning benchmarks; the tool-call diversity component is validated in prompt-level form, and the environment-level and multi-agent extensions are design blueprints left to future work. On clean BBH the protocol does not raise accuracy beyond the 95% Wilson interval; its value is cost-bounded self-verification, with the CONFIRMED early stop terminating 82-88% of items at equal accuracy (about 2.1 generations per question).
Multi-hop fact verification, which verifies claims by reasoning over multiple pieces of evidence, is critical for combating misinformation on social media yet remains highly challenging. Recent methods primarily rely on multi-agent collaboration to decompose fact verification into specialized subtasks. However, these methods face two critical limitations: (1) agents may perform individual subtasks without sufficient awareness of the global verification objective, causing their reasoning to deviate from the intended direction; and (2) conflicts between parametric knowledge and the provided evidence may undermine evidence-grounded reasoning and lead to incorrect verdicts. To address these challenges, we propose ReflectFact, a novel self-reflective agent framework for multi-hop fact verification. ReflectFact introduces three key tasks. Explicit Reasoning Path Planning builds an evidence-grounded reasoning path by resolving implicit entities, decomposing the claim into sub-questions, and integrating the verified facts into a verdict. Evidence-Drift Verification makes the agent re-answer by quoting the supporting evidence when a grounded answer merely echoes its parametric prior, thereby calibrating evidence deviation to ensure grounded comprehension. Reasoning Reflection Verification re-examines each reasoning step and regenerates it once an inconsistency is detected, correcting reasoning flaws such as location bias and replacement bias through a global task perspective. Subsequently, the agent aggregates validated reasoning chains to yield reliable verdicts. Extensive experiments on HOVER and EX-FEVER demonstrate that ReflectFact effectively remedies the comprehension and reasoning defects of existing methods, achieving state-of-the-art performance and respectively outperforming the strongest baseline by 3.32\% and 2.78\% on the two datasets.
Large reasoning models (LRMs) are prone to hallucination, which undermines their reliability and poses challenges for safe deployment. Hallucinations in LRMs arise from two distinct failure sources: reasoning hallucination, where flawed inference steps propagate to an incorrect conclusion, and knowledge hallucination, where the model lacks the requisite factual knowledge to answer the query. To address reasoning hallucination, we propose REIN, an alignment framework that trains LRMs to produce a structured reasoning sequence, $\texttt{<think>} $$\rightarrow$ $\texttt{<reflection>} $$\rightarrow$ $\texttt{<answer>}$, enabling explicit self-reflection before committing to a final answer. To address knowledge hallucination, REIN introduces a reward mechanism that encourages explicit abstention (e.g., "I don't know") when none of the sampled reasoning chains yields a correct answer, allowing the model to refrain from unsupported predictions. Extensive evaluations on mathematical and commonsense reasoning benchmarks show that REIN consistently improves selective accuracy, reduces incorrect-but-self-endorsed responses, and maintains high coverage compared with competitive baselines. Notably, REIN achieves these gains within a single forward pass, without requiring process supervision, inference-time controllers, external search, or multi-round critiques. Experiments on multiple backbones show that REIN reduces the hallucination proxy by $58\sim72\%$ relative to the base models while maintaining $86\sim91\%$ average coverage, and improves selective accuracy on attempted questions by $6.6\sim14.2\%$.
Vision-language models (VLMs) are expected to revise their reasoning when visual evidence changes. Failures to do so are often attributed to insufficient visual attention or contextual inertia, leaving unclear what models reuse instead of recomputing from the current image. We show that evidence-bearing reasoning in a prior chain of thought (CoT) can form a textual shortcut that competes behaviorally with visual recomputation. Across 16 VLMs, a matched counterfactual analysis identifies evidence-bearing content as the most robust carrier of prior-CoT influence. Removing this evidence-bearing content shifts answer preference more than removing length-matched non-evidence context or the final-answer span, with prior control weakening progressively as more stale evidence is removed. Reordering this evidence also weakens prior control, showing that its organization modulates shortcut strength. Beyond the immediate answer, the shortcut can retain residual influence after answer correction: weakening current-image support shifts preference back toward the prior answer, while repeated prior answers and reused premises arise mainly when the shortcut remains active. To limit this influence, we introduce Fresh-State Attention Firewall (FSAF), a training-free intervention that isolates fresh computation from the prior CoT. Across five VLMs, FSAF raises visual update rate from 35.28% to 53.61% and reduces prior-answer rate from 39.22% to 3.67%. Reliable VLM self-reflection therefore requires more than looking again: fresh visual recomputation must be protected from stale textual reuse.
Document-level relation extraction (DocRE) aims to extract relations among multiple entities across extended contexts while maintaining consistency across predicted triples. Although large language models (LLMs) show remarkable reasoning capabilities in information extraction, their predictions are typically generated independently for each candidate triple and may violate fundamental relational constraints such as transitivity, symmetry, and functional uniqueness, leading to contradictory and unreliable outputs. We propose CONSISTRE, a unified consistency-aware framework for DocRE that addresses this limitation through two complementary tracks. The first operates at inference time for black-box LLMs, combining constraint-aware prompting, constraint-based verification, and iterative self-reflection to refine predictions without task-specific fine-tuning. The second injects consistency knowledge into smaller open-source models via a knowledge distillation and reinforcement learning pipeline: reasoning traces from a powerful teacher are distilled into a student via supervised fine-tuning, followed by GRPO alignment using a composite reward that jointly optimizes extraction performance and relational consistency. Together, the two tracks cover both API-accessible and locally deployable scenarios under a unified consistency formulation. Experiments on DocRED show that both tracks outperform their baselines, with the inference-time track achieving competitive F1 using off-the-shelf black-box LLMs and the training-time track substantially narrowing the gap between 7--8B open-source models and state-of-the-art proprietary LLMs at a fraction of their inference cost. Ablation studies confirm that explicit consistency modeling mitigates relational contradictions and enhances the reliability of LLM-based DocRE across both deployment paradigms.
Large language models show strong promise for information extraction (IE), but existing reflection-based correction methods are often misaligned with structured extraction outputs. Free-form self-reflection can flag an error, yet it rarely identifies whether the failure is a missing span, wrong label, boundary mismatch, invalid relation type, or reversed argument order. We introduce LA-RL (Label-Aware Reflective Reinforcement Learning), an outcome-supervised framework that guides IE self-correction with task-grounded diagnostic labels. A single backbone first predicts an extraction, diagnoses task-specific error labels, and then revises its output conditioned on the diagnosis. Training starts from diagnostic data labeled by an annotation model for cold-start supervised fine-tuning and proceeds through two GRPO stages that reward final extraction quality, format validity, and first-pass correctness, without a process reward model. Experiments on named entity recognition, relation extraction, and event extraction show consistent same-backbone gains over SFT, including 6.83 average F1 on SciER relation extraction, about 20 F1 on out-of-distribution relation extraction, and 14.80 trigger F1 plus 17.50 argument F1 on DuEE1.0. Ablations show that reflection structure is task-sensitive: stronger constraints benefit relation extraction, whereas named entity recognition needs less restrictive correction under domain shift.
Current Vision-Language Models (VLMs) often struggle to handle complex visual tasks that require consistent and fine-grained reasoning. Recent methods aim to train models to facilitate self-reflective reasoning, i.e., reviewing and improving the generated reasoning. However, they require large volumes of annotated data and lack explicit reflective behavior during test time. This work aims to bridge this gap through inspiration from neuroscience. The human brain exhibits efficient backward prediction, i.e., predicting which current states are likely to precede a given future state. In this work, we first verify that mainstream VLMs can perform backward prediction, similar to the human brain. Then, we propose Brain-inspired Unsupervised Self-reflection (BUS), a label-free training framework to enhance reflective reasoning capability in challenging image analysis. BUS enables VLMs to perform backward prediction and provide explicit learning signals on data without ground-truth labels. In this way, BUS eliminates reliance on annotated data while improving reasoning performance. Notably, BUS is compatible with popular fine-tuning methods, such as Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL). Finally, extensive experiments on 8 benchmarks demonstrate the effectiveness of BUS across a wide range of complex visual tasks. It achieves notable improvements over the base model while using only unlabeled training data. Our experimental findings validate that backward prediction capability is critical for VLM reasoning.
Training large language models (LLMs) with extended reasoning has enabled in-context search, in which models iteratively generate, critique, and revise solution attempts. We provide a theoretical analysis of in-context search by modeling it as approximate inference over reasoning traces, where the base model defines a prior and self-reflection provides feedback for posterior updates, and study the resulting inference-time sampling complexity - the number of sequential attempts needed to achieve high success probability. We show that when reflections reliably localize early mistakes, in-context search can yield exponential improvements over the base model, solving problems with exponentially small zero-shot pass rates using only a polynomial number of sequential attempts, whereas when this property fails, conditioning on past attempts offers no asymptotic benefit over parallel sampling. We further show that these gains are robust and learnable: approximate posterior updates suffice, and cross-entropy training on search rollouts recovers the required behavior with polynomial sample complexity. Finally, we show that under a stagewise abstraction of reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards, the optimal policy extension implements the same posterior reweighting rule. We validate key qualitative predictions of the theory on real large reasoning models.
Large vision-language models can reason over multimodal inputs by generating textual chains of thought (CoT). A key capability exhibited in CoT reasoning is self-reflection: revisiting earlier decisions and correcting previous errors. However, existing LVLMs often fail to properly attend to visual inputs during reflection, limiting their ability to translate feedback into grounded corrections, especially for out-of-distribution images. To address this issue, we propose a novel reinforcement learning training framework VRRL, with two components explicitly designed to elicit visually grounded self-reflection. First, we randomly mask trajectory prefixes during training to emphasize recovery from incorrect intermediate predictions rather than making early mistakes. Second, we introduce buffered roll-ins from an experience replay buffer to expose the model to diverse failure states that it must learn to correct. We evaluate our approach on visual grounding tasks involving tables and charts, as well as spatial navigation benchmarks. While off-the-shelf and conventionally fine-tuned models degrade substantially under distribution shift, our method substantially improves average out-of-distribution accuracy over standard RL and reflection-oriented fine-tuning baselines by using self-reflection effectively.
Existing benchmarks for deep research agents (DRAs) assess only single-shot outputs, ignoring a key question: can DRAs improve their reports when guided by feedback? To investigate this, we conduct a multi-turn evaluation of DRAs under two feedback settings: self-reflection, in which the agent revises its report without any external diagnostic signal, and process-level feedback, in which the agent receives guidance targeting gaps in its research strategy. To enable process-level feedback, we design Research Gap Inference (RGI), a method that analyzes patterns of satisfied and unsatisfied rubric criteria to infer research-process gaps. Our analysis reveals three key findings: (i) under self-reflection, agents incorporate and regress on rubric criteria at nearly equal rates, yielding negligible net improvement; (ii) a single round of process-level feedback yields substantial gains, raising the normalized score by approximately $8$-$15$ points and yielding a roughly $35$-$40\%$ incorporation rate; (iii) these gains do not compound over subsequent turns, as agents regress on up to $24\%$ of previously satisfied criteria when rewriting the full report to address remaining gaps. Even with targeted guidance, reliable multi-turn improvement remains out of reach for the DRA architectures we evaluate. Our code and results are publicly available at https://github.com/sabharwalrishabh/Multi-Turn-Evaluation-of-DRAs.
Junyi Gong, Zijie Qiu, Ben Zhong Tangphysics.chem-ph cs.AI
Can a general-purpose large language model design molecules with the precision of a seasoned chemist? Current LLM-based frameworks answer this question with scalar feedback loops-generate, score, reject-that amount to informed trial-and-error. Here we show that replacing a single number with the full physicochemical rationale from first-principles calculations transforms the LLM from a stochastic sampler into a causal reasoner. Our system couples retrieval-augmented generation with a self-reflection module that feeds orbital energies, atomic charges, and electron densities-rather than compressed scores-back into the design loop. On HOMO-LUMO gap targets from 1.0 to 5.0 eV, this structure-property-relationship (SPR) reflection achieves a deviation as low as 0.0003 eV and a 100% success rate on moderate tasks, decisively outperforming scalar-feedback and non-reflective baselines. The framework generalizes seamlessly to dipole-moment design and proves robust across five distinct LLM backbones. These results establish a new paradigm: when the model understands not only that a molecule fails, but why, iterative molecular design becomes genuinely mechanistic.
Multilingual LLM-as-a-judge is widely used to evaluate model outputs across languages, but suffers from cross-lingual inconsistency (Fu and Liu, 2025). Existing methods typically treat this inconsistency as noise and mitigate it through voting or aggregation. In this work, we instead show that multilingual inconsistency can provide complementary evaluation signals. Our oracle analysis finds that sampling judgments across languages yields a higher performance upper bound than single-language judging, indicating that different languages potentially include complementary judgments. Motivated by this finding, we propose SEMJ, a self-evolving multilingual judge that leverages cross-lingual inconsistency for iterative refinement. SEMJ constructs multilingual variants of each input, collects independent judgments and rationales, and feeds inconsistent outputs back for self-reflection and re-evaluation. Experiments on multiple benchmarks show that SEMJ consistently outperforms voting and reflection baselines in both accuracy and cross-lingual consistency. Further analysis shows that inconsistency triggers useful re-evaluation, which improves judgment quality.
Jiachen Ma, Jiawen Zhang, Xiangtian Li +3cs.LG cs.AI
While Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable capabilities, they remain susceptible to sophisticated, multi-step jailbreak attacks that circumvent conventional surface-level safety alignment by exploiting the internal generation process. To address these vulnerabilities, we propose Reflector, a principled two-stage framework that internalizes self-reflection within the generation trajectory. Reflector first leverages teacher-guided generation to produce high-quality reflection data for supervised fine-tuning (SFT), establishing structured reflection patterns. It subsequently uses Reinforcement Learning (RL) with outcome-driven and reward-validity supervision to instill robust, autonomous self-reflection capabilities. Empirical results show that Reflector achieves Defense Success Rates (DSR) exceeding 90% against complex indirect attacks while generalizing robustly across diverse threat scenarios. Notably, the framework enhances both task-specific and general utility, yielding a 5.85% gain on GSM8K alongside improved performance on knowledge-intensive benchmarks. By internalizing trajectory-level safety, Reflector overcomes the fundamental limitations of surface alignment without significant computational overhead, offering an efficient and scalable solution for the development of safe and capable LLMs.
Multimodal Stance Detection (MSD) is crucial for understanding public discourse, yet effectively fusing text and image, especially with conflicting signals, remains challenging. Existing methods often face difficulties with contextual grounding, cross-modal interpretation ambiguity, and single-pass reasoning fragility. To address these, we propose Retrieval-Augmented Multi-modal Multi-agent Stance Detection (MM-StanceDet), a novel multi-agent framework integrating Retrieval Augmentation for contextual grounding, specialized Multimodal Analysis agents for nuanced interpretation, a Reasoning-Enhanced Debate stage for exploring perspectives, and Self-Reflection for robust adjudication. Extensive experiments on five datasets demonstrate MM-StanceDet significantly outperforms state-of-the-art baselines, validating the efficacy of its multi-agent architecture and structured reasoning stages in addressing complex multimodal stance challenges.
Huyen Nguyen, Haoxuan Zhang, Yang Zhang +2cs.CL cs.AI cs.DL cs.IR
Reliable evaluation of large language model (LLM)-generated summaries remains an open challenge, particularly across heterogeneous domains and document lengths. We conduct a comprehensive meta-evaluation of 14 automatic summarization metrics and LLM-based evaluators across seven datasets spanning five domains, covering documents from short news articles to long scientific, governmental, and legal texts (2K-27K words) with over 1,500 human-annotated summaries. Our results show that traditional lexical overlap metrics (e.g., ROUGE, BLEU) exhibit weak or negative correlation with human judgments, while task-specific neural metrics and LLM-based evaluators achieve substantially higher alignment, especially for linguistic quality assessment. Leveraging these findings, we propose LLM-ReSum, a self-reflective summarization framework that integrates LLM-based evaluation and generation in a closed feedback loop without model finetuning. Across three domains, LLM-ReSum improves low-quality summaries by up to 33% in factual accuracy and 39% in coverage, with human evaluators preferring refined summaries in 89% of cases. We additionally introduce PatentSumEval, a new human-annotated benchmark for legal document summarization comprising 180 expert-evaluated summaries. All code and datasets will be released in GitHub.