arXiv AI

Reinforcement Learning with Metacognitive Feedback Elicits Faithful Uncertainty Expression in LLMs

arXiv:2606. 32032v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Metacognition is a critical component of intelligence that describes the ability to monitor and regulate one's own cognitive processes.

arXiv AI
Jun 4

Smart Picks in the Dark: Towards Efficient RLVR for Reasoning via Tracing Metacognitive Pivots

arXiv:2606. 04503v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has greatly advanced large reasoning models (LRMs), but it requires timely training on a huge fully-annotated dataset.

By Guangcheng Zhu, Shenzhi Yang, Haobo Wang, Xing Zheng, Yingfan MA, Xuening Feng, Zhongqi Chen, Bowen Song, Weiqiang Wang, Gang Chen
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

LLMs learn different forms of metacognition when trained to predict their own accuracy

The study trains ten open‑weight large language models (LLMs) to predict their own accuracy on factual multiple‑choice questions before answering. Results show that the models’ confidence signals split into two distinct patterns: early in training, confidence aligns with output consistency (how concentrated the answer distribution is), while later, it aligns with true accuracy but only on data similar to the training set. This indicates that calibration training may not universally teach LLMs to detect their own errors.

By Nicolas Yax, Stefano Palminteri, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 2

Enhancing LLM Metacognition via Cognitive Pairwise Training

arXiv:2606. 00869v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has become central to LLM reasoning, but its outcome-level rewards can make models more willing to give confident answers when evidence or reasoning is unreliable.

By Weitao Li, Hao Zhou, Xuanyu Lei, Fandong Meng, Yuanhang Liu, Jingyi Ren, Ante Wang, Xiaolong Wang, Yuanchi Zhang, Fuwen Luo, Guangwen Yang, Lin Gan, Weizhi Ma, Yang Liu
arXiv AI
Sep 21

How do LLMs Compute Verbal Confidence

arXiv:2603.17839v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Verbal confidence -- prompting LLMs to state their confidence as a number or category -- is widely used to extract uncertainty estimates from...

By Dharshan Kumaran, Arthur Conmy, Federico Barbero, Simon Osindero, Viorica Patraucean, Petar Veli\v{c}kovi\'c
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 3

Prompt-Space Meta-Learning Does Not Transfer Across Users: A Frozen-LLM Negative Result

The paper investigates whether a frozen large language model can be personalized to individual users via prompt-space meta‑learning. Using the Muse framework, the authors evolve a shared adaptation prompt across a meta‑train user population and test it zero‑shot on over 200 held‑out users in two personalization benchmarks (LaMP‑2 and LaMP‑3). The results show that Muse does not outperform its un‑evolved seed prompt or a control that trains on mismatched user‑support pairs, and it is outperformed by simple few‑shot retrieval on the rating task. The authors attribute this failure to a meta‑objective collapse, where the validation objective is invariant to genuine user‑support correspondence, leading to over‑optimization of instruction polish rather than transferable adaptation.

By Liam Byrne, David Dylan, Orla Fitzgerald, Eoin Doyle, Ciara Nolan, Padraig Lynch, Sinead Gallagher
arXiv AI
Sep 17

Confidence Comes from Experience: Experiential Confidence Estimation from Reasoning to Agents

The paper introduces XConf, an experiential confidence estimator that augments a language model’s current inference with a record of its past graded episodes. By recalling similar past tasks and reflecting on past outcomes, XConf generates confidence scores without accessing logits or updating weights, achieving superior discrimination and calibration across diverse benchmarks. The method demonstrates significant gains in selective prediction, improving success rates on agent tasks by up to 8.7 points.

By Caiqi Zhang, Xiaochen Zhu, Chengzu Li, Yulong Chen, Dharshan Kumaran, Nigel Collier