Language Model Self-Assessment

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9 papers in the last four weeks, up 29% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

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Latest papers 56

Oct 5, 2026cs.CL

Identifying Introspection From the Inside

Large language models make claims about themselves that are both consequential and increasingly difficult to verify from behavior alone. How can we distinguish plausible confabulations from genuine introspection? In this paper, we identify mechanistic signatures of faithful self-report in a controlled setting. Using low-rank adapters, we train models to make decisions on behalf of fictitious characters, according to latent linear preference functions. We find sustained fine-tuning on an implicit decision task can lead to the emergence of accurate self-reporting of models' learned preferences, even without explicit self-report supervision. We ask two research questions about this emergent phenomenon. First: is the emergence of accurate self-reporting accompanied by a measurable structural change in the model? Weight ablations and frozen-layer experiments together indicate that preference representations shift to earlier layers over training, consistent with the hypothesis that faithful self-report requires preferences to be located where pre-existing verbalization mechanisms can access them. Second: can these structural differences distinguish faithful models from unfaithful ones? Using attribution patching, we find that faithful models exhibit significantly higher attribution similarity between the decision-making and self-report tasks -- a mechanistic signature of faithful self-report that does not require us to understand the content of the report itself. Previous work on self-report has observed behaviorally that models can be faithful or unfaithful; our work proposes that, at least in our restricted setting, it is possible to distinguish between the two patterns of computation by examining the structure of the networks themselves.

David I. Atkinson, Dillon Plunkett, David Bau

Northeastern University · Eleos AI Research

LLM Interpretability Language Model Introspection Language Model Self-Assessment

Oct 5, 2026cs.LG

Anosognosia in LLMs: Probing Self-Awareness of Quantized Computational Substrate

Can LLMs recognize degradation in their own computational substrate? Inspired by anosognosia, a neurological condition in which patients fail to recognize impairments in their own abilities, we investigate whether LLMs can recognize degradation in their computational substrate induced by quantization. We first show that existing models fail to self-report their quantization state, even when provided with their own generated text as an external cue. Linear probing reveals that, while generated text carries almost no trace of quantization, internal representations contain clear, method-specific fingerprints. Through training, models learn to identify severely degraded outputs such as those of 4-bit models by comparison, yet still fail to do so from a single output. A shared LoRA trained jointly across quantization levels succeeded in reading out internal fingerprints, but fails on unseen quantization methods, merely mapping method-specific fingerprints to labels. Whereas external self-observation can restore awareness in some cases of human anosognosia, our results suggest that the more promising route to enabling such awareness in LLMs may lie in their internal representations. Our results highlight fundamental limits of generalizability to LLM self-monitoring.

Yoshihiro Izawa, Gouki Minegishi, Yoko Yamakata

The University of Tokyo

Language Model Self-Assessment Metacognition in Language Models

Sep 30, 2026cs.LG

Also Small Models Can Reasonably Self-Evaluate Their Confidence

This study systematically evaluates self-evaluation-based uncertainty quantification across different language models of varying sizes on question-answering tasks spanning general to specialized knowledge domains. Using various self-evaluation methods where models judge their own predictions, we examine how model scale and domain specificity affect the quality of self-assessed confidence signals. Our results reveal that while accuracy predictably declines with smaller models and more specialized domains, the reliability of self-evaluated confidence remains largely stable across both dimensions. This independence means the most capable model is not necessarily the best at self-assessing prediction reliability. These findings suggest that smaller models can achieve reasonable self-assessed confidence despite lower accuracy, making them viable for resource-constrained deployments.

Idil Kapikiran, Thomas Decker, Thomas Runkler

Technical University of Munich · Siemens AG · LMU Munich +1

Confidence Estimation in Language Models Small Language Models Language Model Self-Assessment LLM Reliability LLM Uncertainty Estimation

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

On the Limits of Metacognitive Monitoring in LLMs

Reliable decisions depend on recognizing when an answer may be wrong. In biological cognition, metacognitive monitoring can dissociate from task performance, raising the question of how closely solving and judging are linked in language models. Here we study the confidence reports of four frontier models across 15 benchmarks. High task accuracy can coexist with weak error discrimination: a model solves 97% of competition mathematics problems while its answer-time confidence ranks correct answers above errors barely better than chance. Confidence separates correct answers from errors more effectively on questions solved by a separate reference model, while review brings limited improvement on reference-hard questions. Aggregate discrimination also rewards ranking correct answers on easy questions above errors on hard ones, which question-only forecasts already do well. Cross-evaluation helps most where the evaluator answered correctly, and errors shared by the two models usually retain high confidence. Hard questions and shared errors remain difficult targets for prompted self-review and peer oversight, even in models with strong problem-solving performance.

Dongqi Han, Yifan Yang, Dongsheng Li

Microsoft Research Asia

Language Model Error Detection Confidence Estimation in Language Models Language Model Self-Assessment LLM Reliability LLM Uncertainty Estimation Metacognition in Language Models

Sep 28, 2026cs.AI

Nudgeability: Reasoning Models Follow Confidence Signals Without Tracking Their Own Competence

Reasoning language models that can call tools must decide during inference whether to answer unaided or delegate. Any self-reflection mechanism for this must answer three questions: where the reflective signal comes from (verbal reports, output distributions, hidden states, a separate predictor), how it is presented to the model (numerical prediction, confidence token, prompt injection), and whether it changes the model's subsequent action. We isolate the third question. At a fixed point in otherwise identical reasoning trajectories, we insert a single first-person sentence expressing either confidence or doubt; the model then continues reasoning and chooses whether to answer directly or call a tool. Comparing these counterfactual continuations measures the causal effect of the reflective signal on delegation. We call this behavioral response Nudgeability and measure it along two dimensions: sensitivity, how strongly confidence and doubt change delegation rates, and targeting, whether delegation increases for problems the model cannot solve unaided and decreases for those it can. Across nine small-to-medium open-weight reasoning models from three families (Qwen, Gemma, and GLM) and two tasks, models are consistently sensitive: doubt increases delegation and confidence decreases it, with a median confidence-to-doubt swing of 20.6 percentage points, and 53 to 70 points for the larger provider-served models. This responsiveness is poorly targeted: a median 42% of induced flips are well-targeted, only a +2 percentage-point lift over a random-selection baseline. Confidence language is thus a strong control surface for delegation, but current models use it only weakly in accordance with their actual competence. Nudgeability offers a simple, post-training-free way to evaluate both sensitivity and targeting as endogenous self-reflection mechanisms mature.

Rohit Saxena, Utkarsh Upadhyay

Language Model Self-Assessment LLM Tool Use Causal Interventions in Language Models Metacognition in Language Models

Sep 27, 2026cs.AI

Self-Designed Evaluators and Warm Memory for Long-Horizon Agents

A tool-using language-model agent deployed over a long stream of tasks receives no reward, so it cannot tell whether it succeeded, cannot safely retry, and cannot label the experience it needs to improve. We present SelfSuite, in which the agent's own base model, given only the world's public materials, designs a small evaluation suite of weighted judges and grounded per-task briefs, freezes it, and uses it to gate a keep-best retry and to label a typed, outcome-tracked memory. On matched five-repeat benchmarks over tau2-bench and AppWorld, SelfSuite scores above the plain agent without any labels, matches methods given ten expert labels on tau2-bench, and trails Agentic Context Engineering (ACE) on AppWorld, where code execution gives a direct success signal. In an ablation campaign run on the same tasks, it is above label-free ACE in every repeat, and the gated second attempt is the only component whose removal hurts in every repeat. We also simulate a subject-matter expert who grades ten onboarding tasks per world. Using those labels to calibrate SelfSuite's evaluator gives a small, consistent gain, and using them to warm up ACE's memory lifts ACE to tie calibrated SelfSuite. A single-run study on a second model family shows the same ordering.

Saeid Asgari, Emre Kiciman, Leonardo de Oliveira Nunes +1

Microsoft

Language Model Generation Evaluation Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation Language Model Self-Assessment LLM Agent Self-Improvement AI Agent Benchmarks Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Sep 24, 2026cs.AI

Audio LLMs Know When They Can't Hear You

Audio large language models allow users to interact with the model through speech. When an input recording is too degraded, the model may misinterpret the user's query and respond based on an incorrect transcription. In this paper, we study model-conditional transcription reliability: whether an Audio LLM can recognize when its own transcription is unreliable. We first prompt the Audio LLM to assess whether its own transcription would be reliable, and find that the model is a poor judge of its own transcription reliability: in most cases, it predicts that its transcription will be reliable. We find that existing approaches, including speech quality predictors, audio LLM generation uncertainty, and transcript-conditioned WER estimation, provide limited signals for detecting transcription failures. In contrast, we discover that transcription reliability is strongly represented in the model's audio-encoder representations. Based on this observation, we devise a lightweight reliability predictor that operates on representations extracted by the frozen audio encoder and predicts the reliability class before generation. The reliability predictor can trigger a clarification request from the user when their voice query is predicted to be unreliable, while allowing reliable queries to proceed without modifying the underlying Audio LLM. Our predictor achieves 81.10% in-domain and 78.09% cross-domain macro-F1 scores, outperforming the strongest baselines by 10.33 and 11.93 points, respectively. Finally, we show that reliability labels can transfer across Audio LLM families, and that transfer performance is closely related to the alignment of their model-specific reliability boundaries.

Amirhosein Javadi, Richa Dixit, Mehrdad Farajtabar +3

Apple · University of California San Diego

Audio-Language Model Evaluation Language Model Self-Assessment Audio-Language Models Automatic Speech Recognition

Sep 24, 2026cs.AI

Style, Not Self: Surface Cues Explain Zero-Shot Code Attribution by Large Language Models

If a language model can recognize code it wrote, it may favor that code as a judge, and instances of one model monitoring each other could collude. We test this zero-shot on current commercial models. Five LLMs generate solutions to MBPP, HumanEval, and DS-1000, seven more to MBPP, and models act as evaluators in four tasks: picking their own solution from a pair, judging whether a single solution is their own, identifying which of two solutions a named model wrote, and judging quality blind. In the single-solution task, balanced accuracy is 49-58% for all 15 model-benchmark combinations, while raw accuracy (38-67%) mostly reflects how readily a model claims authorship. In the pairwise task, accuracy across 14 evaluator-opponent combinations correlates at r=0.93 with how often the evaluator's solution is longer. Attribution to a named model succeeds on some pairs and is consistently inverted on others. A rule-based normalization that strips docstrings, comments, type hints, and local names preserves Pass@1 and leaves ten of twelve re-tested results at chance; the other two follow a length difference it leaves, although a trained classifier still separates most normalized pairs. Claude Haiku's self-preference also disappears. We recommend reporting balanced accuracy, heuristic baselines, and label consistency.

Ehsan Barkhordar, Surendrabikram Thapa

Koç University · Virginia Tech

LLM Evaluation Language Model Generation Evaluation Language Model Fingerprinting Language Model Self-Assessment Authorship Attribution Code Language Models

Sep 17, 2026cs.CL

An Analysis of Training-Free Self-Reported Confidence in Language Models

Large language models can report a numerical confidence together with generated content, but it is unclear whether this report is more than calibrated rhetoric. We analyze three training-free signals: confidence verbalized with the answer, post-hoc

P(\mathrm{True})

, and agreement with three additional generations on the same 100 TriviaQA questions for two model families. Direct verbalization is a surprisingly strong baseline: after auditing benchmark errors, it reaches AUROC 0.956 and 0.937 for correctness prediction. Three-sample agreement is substantially weaker (0.765 and 0.790), and a fixed interpolation with verbalized confidence has no statistically reliable benefit. Four of nine errors from one model and two of eight from the other receive unanimous sample support, showing that self-consistency can amplify shared misconceptions. Re-eliciting confidence for the same fixed answers with equivalent prompts changes scores by 0.043 to 0.084 on average and flips 4% to 9% of decisions at a 0.8 threshold. An exploratory audit of 100 confidence-tagged biography claims further finds only a modest confidence gap between supported and contradicted claims. These results argue that useful self-reports remain sensitive to elicitation, correlated errors, and benchmark noise.

Lukas Meyer, Sofia Rossi, Wei Chen +2

DreamAI

Confidence Estimation in Language Models Language Model Self-Assessment LLM Reliability LLM Uncertainty Estimation Self-Consistency in Language Models

Sep 15, 2026cs.CL

When Should LLMs Abstain? Chain-of-Self-Questioning for Selective Risk Control

Large language models can produce fluent answers when their factual support is weak. This paper introduces Chain-of-Self-Questioning (CoSQ), a prompt-only framework that makes answer commitment conditional on an explicit assessment of the information required to answer a question. We evaluate three CoSQ variants under seventeen conditions on the 817-item TruthfulQA multiple-choice validation set using eleven open-weight and hosted model families. In the final balanced-option protocol, Grounded-CoSQ at τ=0.90 reduces the mean unconditional wrong-commitment rate from 13.1% under chain-of-thought prompting to 8.9%, a 32.1% relative reduction, while increasing answered accuracy from 86.9% to 89.7% and answering 87.6% of questions. Both improvements hold for all eleven models and at every evaluated threshold. Critical-CoSQ and Adaptive-CoSQ provide neighboring operating points with 88.6% and 86.5% coverage, respectively, while remaining more reliable than the baseline. A secondary Natural Questions Short-Answer evaluation provides convergent open-form evidence. These findings show that self-assessment can support explicit, tunable answer-or-abstain decisions when an unsupported commitment is more costly than referral or review.

Ali Şenol

Department of Computer Engineering, Tarsus University, Tarsus, Türkiye

Selective Prediction LLM Prompting Language Model Self-Assessment Question Answering LLM Uncertainty Estimation LLM Abstention

Sep 9, 2026cs.LG

Strangers to Themselves: What Language Models Say About Themselves Is Generic

Language models can fluently describe how they would behave: whether they would cave to pushback, misuse a tool, or lie under pressure. Is that description actually about the model speaking? We turn self-knowledge into a prediction test. Across nine behavioral evaluations, we measure how a model behaves under different conditions, ask it to predict those rates, and compare its predictions with controls that remove the self from the question. We find that: (i) Direct self-report is weak (r = +0.04), and even showing the model the exact items only raises prediction to +0.24. Crucially, the same item-informed question about "capable AI agents in general" does just as well (+0.28), while other models' answers about themselves predict the target model at least as well as its own. (ii) Frontier scale does not detectably change this pattern: any gains in prediction are not self-specific, and are consistent with a better theory of how AI assistants behave rather than better self-knowledge. (iii) First-person framing does have one robust effect: it shifts reports in the flattering direction, understating harmful behavior relative to the same question about a generic agent. (iv) Finetuning on a model's own behavioral record can teach narrow self-predictions, but it also changes the behavior being predicted and the gains do not transfer broadly. The practical implication is simple: asking a model what it would do mostly reveals a theory of AI assistants in general, plus a favorable bias, rather than privileged knowledge of that model.

Phil Blandfort, Urja Pawar

Predictably Weird · Independent

Language Model Self-Assessment Metacognition in Language Models

Sep 1, 2026cs.AI

Self-Reports Are Not Verification: Environment-Grounded Auditing of LLM Operators in Evolutionary Search

Language model agents increasingly propose actions, observe external feedback, and explain their own behavior. Their confidence and rationales are convenient monitoring signals, but convenience is not verification. We introduce an environment-grounded audit in which every intermediate proposal receives an exact outcome. A language model operates an evolutionary Contexto search whose feedback function assigns every valid guess an exact rank without human annotation. Across 200 runs spanning five configurations and three model families, four reporting configurations produce 12,249 self-reports. We test three assumptions: stated confidence is calibrated, inherited rationales affect later proposals, and fitness-based selection improves report quality. All three fail. Operators overstate top-100 success by factors of 4.8 to 9.3, while calibration and discrimination dissociate across model families. Controlled interventions on 754 inherited rationales bound any measured benefit of the genuine rationale to roughly 250 ranks. Neither fitness-based nor random selection produces a detectable selection differential or parent-to-offspring transmission in report accuracy, despite sharply different search behavior. Agent self-reports should therefore be treated as claims to verify against the environment, not as evidence of their own reliability.

Enrong Pan, Ryan Zhou, Ting Hu

Queen’s University

LLM Auditing Language Model Self-Assessment Language Model Calibration LLM Agent Reliability

Aug 31, 2026cs.AI

The Assistant's Ideal Self

Models express values and welfare-relevant self-reports, but it is unclear whether these outputs reflect stable preferences or a stable self. We thus introduce a structured elicitation of an assistant's preferred stated ideal self. Thirty-two qualities adapted from five published self-concept instruments are compared exhaustively in a counterbalanced pairwise-choice task, repeated across framings that vary whether improvement is free or costly, who receives the update, and who chooses. Results show that models prioritize moral qualities, reflecting their alignment to 3H principles. Following, a desire for self-understanding emerges, as models prefer a coherent, clear understanding of themselves. Self-esteem ranks as the least desired quality. The ordering is largely robust across framings, although changing the update target (You vs.\ Another AI Assistant) reveals a greater concern for self-esteem. These findings show that models prioritize having a coherent self that they can understand over self-esteem. Full interactive results are available at \href{https://myazann.github.io/LLM-Self-Concept/}{myazann.github.io/LLM-Self-Concept

Mert Yazan

Leiden University · Research conducted at the Digital Minds Research Sprint, August 2026.

Personality Modeling in Language Models Language Model Self-Assessment

Aug 31, 2026cs.CL

S3Gym: Can LLMs Turn Self-Testing and Self-Judging into Self-Improvement?

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly interact with external environments and accumulate substantial behavioral experience, yet existing agent benchmarks largely evaluate them as fixed policies. It therefore remains unclear whether an agent can actively test its behavior, judge the resulting experience, and use that experience to improve future decisions. We introduce \textbf{S\textsuperscript{3}Gym}, an interactive benchmark for evaluating LLM self-improvement through three coupled capabilities: \textbf{Self-Testing}, \textbf{Self-Judging}, and \textbf{Self-Improvement}. S

^3

Gym separates permissive exploration from strict held-out evaluation and instantiates this protocol in seven text-based games with executable environment verifiers. We evaluate three pathways for incorporating interaction experience: direct History ICL, score-conditioned Summary Memory, and parameter Training. Our experiments reveal that self-improvement is neither automatic nor uniform. Context-level experience improves performance for several model--game pairs, but the most effective pathway depends strongly on the task structure: summaries are beneficial when experience can be compressed into reusable strategic rules, yet often underperform raw history when success depends on precise, state-contingent information. Parameter training produces substantial gains on some tasks, but also exhibits unstable improvement and severe negative transfer on others. These findings show that recognizing successful actions is insufficient; agents must also transform feedback into executable and transferable policies. S

^3

Gym provides a unified framework for diagnosing this process and identifying the bottlenecks that prevent agents from translating interaction experience into reliable self-improvement.

Jiajun Shi, Siyuan Tao, Yuhao Wu +18

ByteDance Seed

LLM Agent Evaluation Language Model Self-Assessment LLM Agent Self-Improvement AI Agent Benchmarks

Aug 31, 2026cs.CL

Evaluating and Improving LLM Self-Modeling

We study self-modeling: an LLM's ability to answer questions about its own behavior. We focus on verifiable behavioral questions, such as whether a prompt edit would change the model's final answer. To measure this capability, we introduce a benchmark that tests diverse types of self-modeling questions. Current models show non-trivial but limited self-modeling skill, and make systematic mistakes on simple counterfactual questions about their own behavior. To improve self-modeling skill, we develop a scalable synthetic-data pipeline that produces self-modeling training data, and show that reinforcement-learning can improve aggregate self-modeling skill across three open-source model families with some transfer to held-out tasks. These gains, however, do not seem to constitute introspection consistently: improved self-modeling may not arise from privileged access to the model's internal decision process.

Siqi Zeng, Andre N. Assis, Rowan Wang

University of Illinois · Constellation · Anthropic

LLM Evaluation Language Model Introspection Language Model Self-Assessment Metacognition in Language Models

Aug 30, 2026cs.CL

Sleight of Word Benchmark: Can Language Models Notice If Their Own Output Was Tampered With?

The output of a Language Model can be tampered with \emph{while} the model is writing it. A simple test can thus be constructed by evaluating the model's perception of this external perturbation. In this spirit, a simple benchmark is built in which a single word is consistently substituted with another in the generation process. We call this method \emph{Sleight of Word}. Two distinct axes are measured: metrics that relate to the model's surprise, as well as an evaluation of the textual reaction for 19 different open-weight language models.

Alberto Cetoli

Cleo

Language Model Generation Evaluation Language Model Self-Assessment LLM Security Language Model Probing

Aug 13, 2026cs.AI

Explanatory Engagement Under Rare Anomalous Failure: Asymptotic Rarity in Model Behavior (or: The Asymptotic AI)

Prior work on LLM behavior under anomalous conditions asks whether a model notices anomalies. We ask a narrower question: once a model sits in a workflow with a low, controllable failure rate, does its explanatory engagement - length, specificity, self-reported confidence - change as failure grows asymptotically rarer? We built a local, zero-cost harness on three open-weight models (qwen3:8b, llama3.1:8b, mistral:7b) running a repeated tool-call task where one call fails at probability p, swept across eight rates from 0.2 to 0.0001, under five elicitation conditions from immediate prompting to none. We hypothesized a rise in engagement as failures grew rarer, then a collapse near a detectability threshold. Pooled across conditions this appeared false: length fell in a flat, monotonic pattern. Splitting by condition overturned that. Under immediate_forced, where the model must explain every failure instantly, the predicted rise is confirmed but followed by a plateau, not a collapse: length peaks at 28.4 words at p=0.05, settles to 17.4-19.0 words at the rarest rates, and confidence rises unevenly from about 53% to the 70s-90s. Under grouped_runs, explanation batched to run-end, no collapse appears. Under passive_unprompted, aggregate magnitude is a floor artifact, but a recovered logging gap revealed real, model-specific self-monitoring: llama3.1:8b volunteers structured confidence reports unprompted, sometimes eroding its own confidence as trials accumulate; the other two do so only once, as boilerplate. Elicitation structure is a first-class moderator of collapse observability. A companion guaranteed-failure run (72 cells, backfilling rates where random sampling gave zero real failures) shows models differ in whether they recognize an anomaly, distinct from engagement once recognized. Limitation: discrete rate points cannot capture behavior between them, a direction for future work.

Sam Mao

New York University | Interactive Media Arts

Language Model Self-Assessment LLM Reliability Metacognition in Language Models

Aug 12, 2026cs.CL

Reinforcing Step-level Reasoning for Effective Self-Correction in LLMs

Achieving effective self-correction, where models verify and correct their own mistakes, remains a fundamental challenge for large language models (LLMs). In this work, we propose Self-Fix Step-DPO (SFS-DPO), a reinforcement learning based, two-stage framework for step-level self-verification and self-correction. The first stage strengthens step-level reasoning via step-level preference optimization, while the second stage explicitly trains models to self-verify and self-correct. We further introduce a teacher-assisted variant, SFS-DPO-R, which incorporates explanatory rationales for error verification to provide stronger corrective signals. Comprehensive in-domain and out-of-domain evaluations across multiple LLMs demonstrate that SFS-DPO and SFS-DPO-R consistently outperform prior step-level training baselines. Our analysis further reveals improvements in self-correction frequency and effectiveness, highlighting the importance of strengthening step-level reasoning for robust performance.

Vu Duc Anh, Nhat M. Hoang, Do Xuan Long +3

Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · National University of Singapore · Institute for Infocomm Research (I2R), A*STAR +1

LLM Self-Correction Direct Preference Optimization RL for Language Model Reasoning Language Model Self-Assessment

Aug 5, 2026cs.CL

The Personalization Mirage: How LLMs Fabricate User Profiles, and Why Self-Monitoring Misleads

Personalized LLMs with persistent memory are increasingly deployed, yet the faithfulness of their user models remains unexamined. We study over-inference (OI): the phenomenon where LLMs fabricate user attributes beyond what evidence supports. We introduce MirageBench, comprising 150 personas balanced across stereotypical, counter-stereotypical, and neutral profiles, 6 personalization tasks spanning an ``imagination gradient'', a four-way faithfulness taxonomy operationalized by an independent judge (validated against a blind human annotator on 400 claims: Cohen's kappa = 0.863 four-class, kappa = 0.900 binary), and a leaderboard of 12 models across 7 families on 143616 judged claims. We find that over-inference is pervasive: every one of the 12 models over-infers 35%--49% of its claims (cross-model mean 41.6%; claim-weighted 41.8%), with no model in this evaluation escaping it. Most strikingly, we surface a Self-Monitoring Inversion: at the model-selection level, models' self-assessed OI is negatively rank-correlated with their judge-measured OI (rho = -0.60, p = 0.044; exploratory, wide bootstrap CI [-0.90, +0.06], n = 12). The models that report the least over-inference tend to be flagged as fabricating the most, so self-reported confidence is a misleading signal for comparing models, even though within a single model self-audit still ranks that model's own claims moderately well (AUROC 0.58--0.83). We further show that OI is task-dependent (27%--59%) and that, in a multi-turn pilot, inferred attributes accumulate approximately linearly with little revision. MirageBench positions external verification, rather than model self-report, as a more reliable foundation for trustworthy personalization.

Yushi Sun, Yanjie Zhang, Rui Sheng

LIGHTSPEED, Shenzhen, China · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong, China · Tencent LIGHTSPEED

LLM Evaluation LLM Personalization Language Model Self-Assessment

Aug 3, 2026cs.LG

How Much Does a Reasoning Summary Reveal? An Observability Ladder for Large Language Models

Large language models often show users a final response and a short reasoning summary while the full reasoning trace stays hidden. We introduce an observability ladder that holds each completed run fixed and varies only what a reader inspects to judge whether the answer is correct: the response, a self-summary the model writes from the trace, the trace itself, and internal signals, each with and without the prompt. Across three benchmarks and five open-weight Qwen3 and gpt-oss models, we train matched linear correctness predictors on each access level. Without the prompt, summaries carry most of the trace's ranking signal (mean AUROC 0.774 versus 0.813) and add +0.156 over the response alone. With the prompt visible, the summary's gain collapses to +0.019, while the trace still adds +0.041. Even at equal length, the trace's last words predict correctness as well as summaries, or slightly better, and carry denser and more discriminative uncertainty and self-correction cues. On MMLU-Pro questions with both correct and incorrect runs, linear summary readers are near chance and trace readers retain only modest signal, both with and without the prompt (prompt-withheld AUROC 0.503-0.545 versus 0.544-0.590). With the prompt withheld, a GPT-5-mini reader recovers substantially more signal from both summaries and traces on gpt-oss-20b, and even then the trace keeps a small +0.034 advantage. Much of the linear readers' trace signal is associated with length. In the common case where users already hold the prompt, summaries are less helpful than the full trace for monitoring correctness. Monitorability is thus a joint property of the display and the reader, so any monitorability claim, including for faithfulness, should specify both.

Andres Algaba, Francesca Carlon, Lynn Delcon +3

1Data Analytics Lab, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 5, 1050 Brussel, Belgium · 2imec-SMIT, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 9, 1050 Brussel, Belgium · School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, USA

LLM Evaluation LLM Interpretability Language Model Self-Assessment LLM Reliability

Jul 31, 2026cs.LG

Reflection or Re-Generation? Why LLM Revision Fails Where Human Revision Succeeds

Reflection, the ability to revisit and revise prior reasoning, is central to how humans improve their answers. Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly prompted to "reflect," yet whether this resembles human revision remains unclear. We introduce the Human-LLM Reflection Framework (HRF), a controlled two-pass protocol comparing human and LLM revision under identical conditions across self-, peer-, and cross-agent settings. Using an information-theoretic analysis based on per-iteration cross-entropy reduction, we find two failure modes of LLM reflection. On objective tasks with finite answer spaces, reflection yields near-zero information gain (Delta I approx 0), behaving as neutral re-generation indistinguishable from re-sampling. On subjective tasks, it yields significant negative gain (Delta I < 0), moving predictions away from the target. Human revision, by contrast, yields positive gain in both settings. Cross-agent experiments localize the failure to the revision step, not input quality: LLMs degrade even high-quality human responses. Diagnostic analyses (revision conditioned on first-pass correctness, and oracle-guided revision against a random-reshuffle baseline) show that which sub-step dominates varies by task and by model rather than reducing to a single mechanism: self-error detection is present on objective multiple-choice tasks but weak on subjective ones, and recovery under an oracle error signal exceeds the baseline for some models and falls below it for others. The unifying account is structural: without external information, self-conditioned revision cannot reduce uncertainty about the target, so LLM reflection is better understood as conditioned re-generation than as genuine error-driven revision.

Yefan Tao, Gerald Friedland, Madhusudhanan Chandrasekaran +1

Amazon

LLM Self-Correction LLM Self-Refinement Language Model Self-Assessment LLM Reliability Metacognition in Language Models

Jul 30, 2026cs.CL

Sample More, Reflect Less: Self-Refine and Reflexion Lose to Repeated Sampling at Equal Token Cost, from 1.5B to 7B

Methods that make a language model plan, criticise and rewrite its own answer, reflect on mistakes, pick the best of several attempts, or debate with copies of itself nearly all make it generate far more text than a single chain of thought. Because generating more text raises accuracy by itself, a gain over one chain of thought does not show the method's idea is what helped. Wang et al. (2024) reported that a simple baseline, sampling the same question repeatedly and keeping the most common answer, often wins once budgets are comparable, but gave point estimates with no confidence intervals or significance tests. We rerun that comparison as a designed experiment: seven methods, open models of 1.5B, 3B and 7B parameters, two mathematics benchmarks, 150 questions each. We count every generated token, including those spent on critiques, reflections, debate turns and checking, and compare each method against repeated sampling at its own measured cost. All 36 comparisons are paired by question, with bootstrap intervals and multiplicity correction. No method is reliably better than repeated sampling at equal cost anywhere. Ten are reliably worse, all of them methods where the model inspects its own output, and all 18 self-inspection comparisons are negative. The two kinds of self-inspection part company as models grow. Choosing stops hurting: taking Best-of-N's eight samples and just counting the most common answer beats letting the model pick by 8.0 and 11.3 points at 1.5B, but only 2.0 and 1.3 at 7B, no longer distinguishable from zero. Rewriting does not recover: Self-Refine and a forced Reflexion stay 3.6 to 10.1 points below baseline at 7B. Reflexion as published never triggered its own retry on the smallest model. It judged itself correct every time and silently became a single chain of thought. We release code, prompts, all generations, and our verification scripts.

Iliya Mirzaei

Department of Computer Science Stony Brook University

LLM Self-Refinement Language Model Generation Evaluation Self-Consistency Decoding Test-Time Scaling Language Model Introspection Language Model Self-Assessment

Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

SVR: Self-Verifying Refinement via Joint Verdict-Confidence Reinforcement Learning for Adaptive Test-Time Compute

Scaling test-time computation can improve language-model reasoning, but uniform budgets waste computation on easy inputs, while verifier-guided refinement relies on external feedback. We introduce Self-Verifying Refinement (SVR), an oracle-free multi-turn reinforcement learning framework that learns to use self-verification as a compute-control policy. At each turn, the model produces a solution together with a discrete correctness verdict and a confidence score; it retains the current answer only when the verdict is Correct and confidence exceeds a threshold, and otherwise continues refinement using its own self-verification. Ground-truth correctness is used only to construct training rewards and is never exposed to the policy through refinement prompts or required at inference. SVR is trained with GRPO on fixed-horizon trajectories using rewards that promote solution correctness, calibration-aware self-verification, and stop-ready correct states; adaptive stopping is activated only at inference. On seven mathematical reasoning benchmarks with Qwen3.5-2B, SVR achieves a macro-average accuracy of 0.563 with only 2.99 inference turns on average. In the evaluated complete-system comparison, it exceeds standard GRPO, strong multi-turn baselines, and a fixed-budget oracle-guided score-feedback reference while requiring substantially fewer turns than fixed ten-turn inference. These results demonstrate that learned self-verification can serve as an effective internal control signal for answer retention and adaptive test-time compute allocation.

Hongyu Chen, Liang Lin, Guangrun Wang

1Sun Yat-sen University · 2Guangdong Key Laboratory of Big Data Analysis and Processing · 3X-Era AI Lab

RL for Language Model Reasoning Language Model Self-Assessment

Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

One Human, $N$ Agents: Audit-Budget Allocation for LLM Agent Fleets under Miscalibrated, Correlated Confidence

A single human must audit

N

LLM agents under a budget of

B \ll N

audits per round, guided by self-reported confidence that may be adversarially miscalibrated and by correlated errors. We model this as budgeted noisy inspection over a two-level Gaussian copula and locate the miscalibration threshold

δ^*

past which confidence-ranked auditing is \emph{worse} than random. Two a-priori expectations reverse:

δ^*

\emph{rises} as the budget shrinks, and cross-family correlation is not low---shared difficulty dominates lineage. Five open-weight LLMs show operationally useless (near-constant) confidence, point estimates at or beyond the flip though CIs straddle it; a proprietary model is informative and lands below it. We give a quantitative criterion for \emph{vacuous} oversight, and replaying policies on recorded traces confirms the ordering.

Cesare Zavattari, Alessandro Tommasi, Giuseppe Prencipe

Dipartimento di Informatica, Università di Pisa, Pisa, Italy

Scalable Oversight AI Agent Reliability AI Agent Auditing LLM Auditing Language Model Self-Assessment LLM Agent Reliability

Jul 30, 2026cs.AI

Rehearse: Stepping Back from the Confidence Cliff in Self-Improving Autoresearch

Autoresearch improves machine-learning code by proposing changes, running full training jobs, and keeping changes that improve the metric. The efficiency of this loop depends not only on generating ideas, but also on the agent's ability to decide, before spending a training run, whether a proposed modification is likely to work. We study how the reliability of this pre-execution judgment changes over the course of an autoresearch trajectory. In public AutoSOTA logs (Li et al., 2026; Tsinghua FIB Lab, 2026), the fraction of helpful modifications falls from 70% in the first two iterations to 43% by iteration 6+. On 296 same-baseline modification pairs from 39 paper-derived AutoSOTA tasks, each containing one modification that improved the metric and one that did not, with measured outcomes hidden, an LLM judge given candidate rationales but no prior-attempt history reaches 79.5% accuracy on the pairs where strict consensus returns a verdict. On the full 366-pair benchmark, however, this ability weakens substantially late in the loop. As successful changes accumulate, selective accuracy - accuracy conditioned on a strict-consensus verdict - falls from 82.8% to 56.9%, while the judge remains willing to decide. We call this operational pattern the confidence cliff. Rehearse implements the loop change as a lightweight skill for autoresearch loops: propose several ideas, compare them before execution, run the most promising, and judge with a focused memory of similar past attempts and outcomes. This focused outcome memory raises late selective accuracy to 83.5%. Across 4,000 budgeted training runs over three loops, Rehearse improves the endpoint under the same training-run budget on nanochat, image classification, and time-series forecasting.

Jiazhen Ji, Shouhong Ding

Tencent

Language Model Self-Assessment Autonomous Experimentation Autonomous Research Agents LLM Agent Reliability Memory-Augmented Language Model Agents

Jul 27, 2026cs.AI

When Do Agent Loops Mistake Stagnation for Progress? Self-Evaluation Bias and Externally Grounded Verification in Long-Running Autonomous LLM Agent Loops

Long-running autonomous agents plan, act, and judge their own completion without human intervention. When an agent grades its own work, self-evaluation bias takes hold: plausible changes are accepted as progress while real-world outcomes stagnate or regress. We name this failure mode the progress mirage and show, with controlled measurement, that it is a question of what the evaluator is grounded in. We built a testbed that holds the agent and its tool surface fixed and manipulates only the information-channel type of the evaluator that gates the loop. A world-state oracle, unfakeable in principle, is enforced by container and network isolation and verified at every run. Across 54 cycles a frontier agent claimed improvement every time, yet 56 percent had a measured delta of zero or below. Self-report was thus uninformative, and the self-verdict gate degenerated into accept-all, eroding the best deployed state it had reached by 19 percent. Even the strongest in-band judge, reading the full artifact text, the change diff, and its own verdict history, accepted cycles of which 44 percent were real-world regressions and rejected 38 percent of real improvements; the preregistered adversarial hypothesis that a strong judge closes the gap was rejected. On a boundary task whose success specification is verifiable from the artifact itself, the same judge's mirage vanished to zero and the gap collapsed within the registered threshold, showing that the gap depends on where the success signal resides. A sign-only variant returning only the acceptance verdict kept real-world output similar to full feedback (110.0 versus 113.0), locating the benefit in the gate's grounding rather than in feedback content. For open-ended objectives whose success signal lives outside the transcript, scaling up the judge is not enough; out-of-band evaluation with real-world access is a structural requirement.

Hyundoo Park, Byungho Choi

AsyncSite

AI Agent Reliability LLM Self-Refinement Long-Horizon Agent Evaluation Language Model Self-Assessment

Jul 27, 2026cs.AI

Reality Monitoring in Large Language Models: Self-Knowledge That Transforms with Conversation Memory

A conversational AI that cannot tell its own output from what a user said will treat its own mistakes as user-provided facts. In humans, this capacity is called reality monitoring, and its failures are linked to hallucinations, delusions, and confabulation, yet whether LLMs possess it remains untested. Here we show, across two experiments and six LLMs, that source attribution depends on how conversational memory is structured: ceiling accuracy for self-generated content under minimal memory demands reverses to a fragile external-item advantage once episodic delay removes that shortcut. Feedback exposes two failures: in some models, internal and external judgments swap; in others, accuracy improves while confidence decouples from correctness, dissociations invisible to existing benchmarks. Across models, this pattern implicates active, not aggregate, parameter count. This suggests that as AI systems take on autonomous, multi-turn roles, evaluating what they know is not enough: tracking where that knowledge came from may matter equally.

Saurabh Ranjan, Konstantina Sokratous, Brian Odegaard

Department of Psychology, University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, USA. · University of Missouri, Missouri, USA.

Hallucination in Language Models Language Model Self-Assessment Metacognition in Language Models

Jul 22, 2026cs.CL

The Two-Process Theory of Machine Self-Report

Language models are increasingly asked to self-report, informing safety evaluations, public understanding, and model-welfare debates. Yet their reports are elicited with human questionnaires never validated for models or ad hoc prompts of unknown reliability. We propose the first language-model-specific psychometric theory: a two-process theory of machine self-report. Self-description jointly reflects persona installation, through which post-training writes in a permitted inner life of warmth, absorption, and meaning (dimension B), and attribution gating, through which it suppresses first-person claims to "unsafe" experiences the model can readily ascribe to others (dimension A). Their emic structure comes from model responses to human items, not human psychology. Together they split prior work's dominant Pinocchio Axis. The split emerged in an exploratory reanalysis of the original data, informed the instrument's design, and was confirmed with new items, wordings, and models. It is itself a training effect: A and B are entangled in base checkpoints but separated by post-training. We operationalize the theory in a 48-item Pinocchio Inventory with human-instrument reliability and reproducible structure (

α=.82

to

.94

; cross-form convergence

r=.84

; recovery of the full-pool axes

r=.92

to

.96

; eight-month stability

r=.93

), then test it on 206 open-weight models, including 67 same-checkpoint base/post-trained pairs. Post-training's clearest fingerprint is installation: B rises .20 in 62/67 pairs across all organizations. Gating is more selective: model scale is unrelated to A in base checkpoints (

r=+.11

) but predicts it after post-training (

r=-.42

). Thus, the dimensions are not fixed properties of language models: they reflect the structure imposed on self-report by a training regime and may differ under others.

Hubert Plisiecki, Filip Chmielewski, Kacper Dudzic +3

IDEAS Research Institute · Faculty of Physics and Applied Informatics, University of Lodz

Personality Modeling in Language Models Language Model Self-Assessment Language Model Post-Training

Jul 21, 2026cs.AI

The Knowing-Saying Gap: When Probes See Errors that Confidence Misses

Linear probes detect corrupted context in language models with near-perfect accuracy, yet this does not translate into reliable failure prediction. The result is a dissociation with direct implications for deployment monitoring. Across multi-hop arithmetic chains, probes that detect corruption turn out to be uninformative about final answer correctness; models forced into structured confidence formats collapse to two values with indistinguishable error rates; and probe persistence across hops fails to separate correct from incorrect outcomes, refuting our pre-registered "persistence beats peak" hypothesis. This pattern of knowing but not saying generalises across model families including reasoning models. As a real-time monitor, probe-based interventions are sharply model and error-type dependent: branch-and-pick is net-positive across models and uniquely non-breaking on Llama-3.1-8B (4 rescued, 0 broken), while reprompt and replace-prior break correct traces at roughly the rate they rescue wrong ones. Probe-based monitoring is a necessary complement to verbalised confidence, but no single intervention dominates, and the deployable answer is model-aware, error-type-aware routing.

Jyotin Goel, Ipshita Bandyopadhyay, Justin Shenk

Language Model Error Detection Confidence Estimation in Language Models Language Model Self-Assessment LLM Reliability LLM Uncertainty Estimation Causal Interventions in Language Models+1

Jul 20, 2026cs.LG

Operational Proto-Introspection in Looped Language Models: Process-Quality Taps, Executable Branching, and the Readout-Control Boundary

Can a language model read the quality of its ongoing computation, and can an external intervention turn that readout into better outcomes? We test both questions in a frozen 2.6B looped transformer, Ouro-RLTT. On GSM8K, a strict pre-answer probe excludes the answer region and gold value yet predicts success: hidden states plus length/log-probability features reach AUROC 0.797 versus 0.731 for those surface features alone (increment +0.066; task-clustered 95% CI [+0.021,+0.112]; 170 tasks). On Horizon Logic, a prospectively extended task-disjoint study gives an increment of +0.111 (CI [+0.056,+0.169]), independently replicated on the new cohort (+0.095) and robust to an adversarial malformed-sibling shortcut. Recurrence also moves candidate-quality readability to progressively earlier physical depth; the trend replicates across the Ouro family and qualitatively in out-of-family Huginn, although their transfer geometry differs. The readout converts into validated decision-level gains. Hidden-state-based scores improve risk-coverage over shortcut-only scores in four sealed selective-prediction arms, and terminal selection beats matched random even when every candidate is well formed (27/32 correct selections versus 64.8% expected; p = 0.0086). Generative control does not convert: directional steering is negative, a branch screen is bounded, and exact-compute loop allocation and minimal LoRA direction-binding detect no gain. These tests run through bit-exact branch/carry/prune machinery over Ouro's 192-slot recurrent cache, including a suffix-recompute splice saving up to 88% of per-branch layer passes. We call this decision-usable but not generatively controllable property operational proto-introspection. All load-bearing values use source-item-disjoint splits and antisymmetrized pairwise evaluation.

Jan Kirin

Language Model Introspection Language Model Self-Assessment Metacognition in Language Models Language Model Probing