arXiv AI

When Should LLMs Trust Their Own Revisions? A Risk-Aware Study of Intrinsic Self-Correction

The paper investigates intrinsic self‑correction, where a language model revises its own answer without new evidence. Across 29 open‑weight LLMs on BoolQ, GSM8K, and Corr2Cause, the study tracks how revisions change correctness, revealing that while some models improve significantly, others lose a notable fraction of correct answers. The authors compare three runtime strategies—keeping the initial answer, always accepting the revision, and selectively gating revisions—and find that the best approach depends on the model and task, suggesting that self‑correction should be treated as a revision policy rather than a uniformly beneficial second pass.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

Return or Revise? Learning When Revision Helps Retrieval-Augmented QA

The paper investigates when it is better to return an existing draft answer or revise it using retrieved evidence in retrieval‑augmented QA systems. By grading both the draft and its candidate revision with the same correctness judge, the authors define a paired effect called recoverability and train policies to predict it before revision. Experiments on 25,870 open‑domain questions show that a recoverability‑based scorer outperforms a draft‑correctness scorer across multiple Llama setups, improving accuracy–revision trade‑offs and closing a significant portion of the oracle gap, though it still applies harmful revisions in a substantial fraction of cases.

By Nicholas Kashani Motlagh, Tim Anderson, Jeremy Gwinnup, Grant Erdmann
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

Exact Feedback Is Not Control: Evaluating Text-based Closed-Loop Revision in LLMs

The paper introduces a fixed‑budget revision protocol that uses deterministic verifiers to expose all remaining violations across exact‑length, lexical, and compositional constraints, thereby isolating model‑side revision behavior. Experiments on 19 open‑ and closed‑source LLMs show wide variability in controller‑level success, with some models achieving up to 99.8% success while others remain below 20%. Controlled studies reveal that post‑training and scale affect model responses to exact feedback, but do not consistently improve exact correction, and that recurrence of earlier outputs is linked to lower recoverability.

By Haitong Jiang, Chunlin Liu, Yile Wang, Yuhong Feng
arXiv AI
Aug 24

Knowing but Not Saying: Preventing Factual Access Failures in LLM SFT via Recall-Anchored Distillation

The paper identifies a specific issue in supervised fine‑tuning (SFT) of large language models called factual access failure, where models can recognize correct facts under constrained tests but fail to generate them in open‑ended settings. It demonstrates that SFT can cause both genuine wrong answers and expression‑level errors such as verbosity or formatting mismatches. To mitigate this, the authors propose Recall‑Anchored Distillation (RAD), a self‑distillation method that aligns the fine‑tuned model with the base model’s soft output distribution on unlabeled out‑of‑distribution text, thereby recovering lost factual recall without needing labeled data.

By Haodong Chen, Yadong Wang, Shengtao Wen, Dong Liang, Xiang Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Contiguity, Not Importance: Budgeted Repair of Stale KV Caches After Document Edits

The paper investigates how to efficiently repair stale key-value (KV) caches in retrieval‑augmented generation systems after document edits. It proposes a budgeted in‑place recomputation approach and evaluates training‑free position‑selection policies on a factual RAG benchmark. Across three model families, a contiguous edit‑local window consistently recovers most of the post‑edit answer quality while being 13–21 times faster than a full re‑prefill, though its effectiveness diminishes when answer‑bearing text moves downstream.

By Mingyang Mao, Wyatt Mackey, Xiaomin Lin
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Suppressed, Not Erased: A Representational Trace of Edited Facts Survives Even Weight-Free Knowledge Editing

The paper investigates whether knowledge editing truly erases original facts from language models. Using a linear trace probe, the authors find that after editing a fact in GPT‑2‑XL, the original object remains highly decodable from hidden states across three different editing methods, even when the model behaves correctly on edited prompts. This suggests that editing suppresses rather than removes the original association in representational space.

By Priyansh Srivastava, Romit Chatterjee