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Jul 30

CORRECT: COndensed eRror RECognition via knowledge Transfer in multi-agent systems

Multi-agent systems (MAS) are increasingly capable of tackling complex real-world tasks, yet their reliance on inter-agent coordination, tool use, and long-horizon reasoning makes error recognition particularly challenging. Minor errors can propagate across agents, escalating into task failures while producing long, intertwined execution trajectories that impose significant costs for both human developers and automated systems to debug and analyze. Our key insight is that, despite surface differences in failure trajectories (e.g., logs), MAS errors often recur with similar structural patterns. This paper presents CORRECT, the first lightweight, training-free framework that leverages an online cache of distilled error schemata to recognize and transfer knowledge of failure structures across new requests. This cache-based reuse allows LLMs to perform targeted error localization at inference time, avoiding the need for expensive retraining while adapting to dynamic MAS deployments in subseconds. To support rigorous study in this domain, we also introduce CORRECT-Error, a large-scale dataset of over 2,000 annotated trajectories collected through a novel error-injection pipeline guided by real-world distributions, and further validated through human evaluation to ensure alignment with natural failure patterns. Experiments across seven diverse MAS applications show that CORRECT improves step-level error localization up to 19.8% over existing advances while at near-zero overhead, substantially narrowing the gap between automated and human-level error recognition.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 28, 2025 2

Can LLMs Correct Themselves? A Benchmark of Self-Correction in LLMs

Self-correction of large language models (LLMs) emerges as a critical component for enhancing their reasoning performance. Although various self-correction methods have been proposed, a comprehensive evaluation of these methods remains largely unexplored, and the question of whether LLMs can truly correct themselves is a matter of significant interest and concern. In this study, we introduce CorrectBench, a benchmark developed to evaluate the effectiveness of self-correction strategies, including intrinsic, external, and fine-tuned approaches, across three tasks: commonsense reasoning, mathematical reasoning, and code generation. Our findings reveal that: 1) Self-correction methods can improve accuracy, especially for complex reasoning tasks; 2) Mixing different self-correction strategies yields further improvements, though it reduces efficiency; 3) Reasoning LLMs (e.g., DeepSeek-R1) have limited optimization under additional self-correction methods and have high time costs. Interestingly, a comparatively simple chain-of-thought (CoT) baseline demonstrates competitive accuracy and efficiency. These results underscore the potential of self-correction to enhance LLM's reasoning performance while highlighting the ongoing challenge of improving their efficiency. Consequently, we advocate for further research focused on optimizing the balance between reasoning capabilities and operational efficiency. Project Page: https://correctbench.github.io/

  • 14 authors
·
Oct 16, 2025 2

Corrective or Backfire: Characterizing and Predicting User Response to Social Correction

Online misinformation poses a global risk with harmful implications for society. Ordinary social media users are known to actively reply to misinformation posts with counter-misinformation messages, which is shown to be effective in containing the spread of misinformation. Such a practice is defined as "social correction". Nevertheless, it remains unknown how users respond to social correction in real-world scenarios, especially, will it have a corrective or backfire effect on users. Investigating this research question is pivotal for developing and refining strategies that maximize the efficacy of social correction initiatives. To fill this gap, we conduct an in-depth study to characterize and predict the user response to social correction in a data-driven manner through the lens of X (Formerly Twitter), where the user response is instantiated as the reply that is written toward a counter-misinformation message. Particularly, we first create a novel dataset with 55, 549 triples of misinformation tweets, counter-misinformation replies, and responses to counter-misinformation replies, and then curate a taxonomy to illustrate different kinds of user responses. Next, fine-grained statistical analysis of reply linguistic and engagement features as well as repliers' user attributes is conducted to illustrate the characteristics that are significant in determining whether a reply will have a corrective or backfire effect. Finally, we build a user response prediction model to identify whether a social correction will be corrective, neutral, or have a backfire effect, which achieves a promising F1 score of 0.816. Our work enables stakeholders to monitor and predict user responses effectively, thus guiding the use of social correction to maximize their corrective impact and minimize backfire effects. The code and data is accessible on https://github.com/claws-lab/response-to-social-correction.

  • 4 authors
·
Mar 7, 2024

Correcting Neural Operator Spectral Bias via Diffusion Posterior Sampling with Sparse Observations

Neural operator surrogates (NO) approximate PDE solutions orders of magnitude faster than numerical solvers, but suffer from spectral bias: high-frequency content is systematically attenuated, limiting reliability where fine-scale structure matters. Sparse sensor measurements of the field are often available too, offering pointwise accuracy without spectral distortion but covering only a small fraction of the domain. We address this by treating NO predictions as auxiliary observations in a diffusion posterior sampling framework. Our method, FreqNO-DPS (https://github.com/niccoloperrone/FreqNO-DPS), combines an unconditional score-based diffusion prior, trained on high-fidelity simulations, with diffusion posterior sampling (DPS) conditioned on sparse observations and guided by a frozen neural operator. Naive integration reintroduces the surrogate's spectral bias; we resolve this with a closed-form, spectrally shaped guidance score that weights the surrogate by its frequency-dependent accuracy and needs no denoiser backpropagation. A distribution-free analysis bounds the approximation error across the frequency-diffusion-time plane and shows the guidance's frequency dependence is preserved regardless of distributional assumptions. On 3D elastic wavefield prediction at 5% and 2% sensor coverage, the method reaches near-zero spectral bias across all bands, where both the surrogate and sensor-only DPS show systematic high-frequency attenuation. Isotropic guidance, the natural baseline, improves pointwise accuracy but carries the bias into the posterior nearly intact, confirming that frequency-dependent calibration is essential, not merely beneficial. The framework needs only paired surrogate/reference data and exploits no problem-specific structure beyond the residual's approximate spectral diagonality, verifiable for new surrogates via the coherence diagnostic we provide.

  • 4 authors
·
Jun 1

Correcting the Mythos of KL-Regularization: Direct Alignment without Overoptimization via Chi-Squared Preference Optimization

Language model alignment methods such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) have led to impressive advances in language model capabilities, but are limited by a widely observed phenomenon known as overoptimization, where the quality of the language model degrades over the course of the alignment process. As the model optimizes performance with respect to an offline reward model, it overfits to inaccuracies and drifts away from preferred responses covered by the data. To discourage such distribution shift, KL-regularization is widely employed in existing offline alignment methods, but overoptimization continues to harm performance. Lending theoretical insight into the source of these empirical observations, we first show that the KL-regularization is too weak to prevent overfitting, then raise the following question: is it possible to design an efficient algorithm that is provably robust to overoptimization? We address this question with a new algorithm for offline alignment, χ^2-Preference Optimization (χPO). χPO is a one-line change to Direct Preference Optimization (DPO; Rafailov et al., 2023), which only involves modifying the logarithmic link function in the DPO objective. Despite this minimal change, χPO implicitly implements the principle of pessimism in the face of uncertainty via regularization with the χ^2-divergence -- which quantifies uncertainty more effectively than KL-regularization -- and provably alleviates overoptimization, achieving sample-complexity guarantees based on single-policy concentrability -- the gold standard in offline reinforcement learning. χPO's simplicity and strong guarantees make it the first practical and general-purpose offline alignment algorithm that is provably robust to overoptimization.

  • 7 authors
·
Feb 17, 2025

Correctness Assessment of Code Generated by Large Language Models Using Internal Representations

Ensuring the correctness of code generated by Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a significant challenge in AI-driven software development. Existing approaches predominantly rely on black-box (closed-box) approaches that evaluate correctness post-generation, failing to utilize the rich insights embedded in the LLMs' internal states during code generation. In this paper, we introduce OPENIA, a novel white-box (open-box) framework that leverages these internal representations to assess the correctness of LLM-generated code. OPENIA systematically analyzes the intermediate states of representative open-source LLMs specialized for code, including DeepSeek-Coder, CodeLlama, and MagicCoder, across diverse code generation benchmarks. Our empirical analysis reveals that these internal representations encode latent information, which strongly correlates with the correctness of the generated code. Building on these insights, OPENIA uses a white-box/open-box approach to make informed predictions about code correctness, offering significant advantages in adaptability and robustness over traditional classification-based methods and zero-shot approaches. Experimental results demonstrate that OPENIA consistently outperforms baseline models, achieving higher accuracy, precision, recall, and F1-Scores with up to a 2X improvement in standalone code generation and a 46% enhancement in repository-specific scenarios. By unlocking the potential of in-process signals, OPENIA paves the way for more proactive and efficient quality assurance mechanisms in LLM-assisted code generation.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 22, 2025

Corrective Machine Unlearning

Machine Learning models increasingly face data integrity challenges due to the use of large-scale training datasets drawn from the Internet. We study what model developers can do if they detect that some data was manipulated or incorrect. Such manipulated data can cause adverse effects including vulnerability to backdoored samples, systemic biases, and reduced accuracy on certain input domains. Realistically, all manipulated training samples cannot be identified, and only a small, representative subset of the affected data can be flagged. We formalize Corrective Machine Unlearning as the problem of mitigating the impact of data affected by unknown manipulations on a trained model, only having identified a subset of the corrupted data. We demonstrate that the problem of corrective unlearning has significantly different requirements from traditional privacy-oriented unlearning. We find most existing unlearning methods, including retraining-from-scratch without the deletion set, require most of the manipulated data to be identified for effective corrective unlearning. However, one approach, Selective Synaptic Dampening, achieves limited success, unlearning adverse effects with just a small portion of the manipulated samples in our setting, which shows encouraging signs for future progress. We hope our work spurs research towards developing better methods for corrective unlearning and offers practitioners a new strategy to handle data integrity challenges arising from web-scale training. Code is available at https://github.com/drimpossible/corrective-unlearning-bench.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 21, 2024

Correcting diacritics and typos with a ByT5 transformer model

Due to the fast pace of life and online communications and the prevalence of English and the QWERTY keyboard, people tend to forgo using diacritics, make typographical errors (typos) when typing in other languages. Restoring diacritics and correcting spelling is important for proper language use and the disambiguation of texts for both humans and downstream algorithms. However, both of these problems are typically addressed separately: the state-of-the-art diacritics restoration methods do not tolerate other typos, but classical spellcheckers also cannot deal adequately with all the diacritics missing. In this work, we tackle both problems at once by employing the newly-developed universal ByT5 byte-level seq2seq transformer model that requires no language-specific model structures. For a comparison, we perform diacritics restoration on benchmark datasets of 12 languages, with the addition of Lithuanian. The experimental investigation proves that our approach is able to achieve results (> 98%) comparable to the previous state-of-the-art, despite being trained less and on fewer data. Our approach is also able to restore diacritics in words not seen during training with > 76% accuracy. Our simultaneous diacritics restoration and typos correction approach reaches > 94% alpha-word accuracy on the 13 languages. It has no direct competitors and strongly outperforms classical spell-checking or dictionary-based approaches. We also demonstrate all the accuracies to further improve with more training. Taken together, this shows the great real-world application potential of our suggested methods to more data, languages, and error classes.

  • 5 authors
·
Jan 31, 2022

Training Language Models to Self-Correct via Reinforcement Learning

Self-correction is a highly desirable capability of large language models (LLMs), yet it has consistently been found to be largely ineffective in modern LLMs. Existing approaches for training self-correction either require multiple models or rely on a more capable model or other forms of supervision. To this end, we develop a multi-turn online reinforcement learning (RL) approach, SCoRe, that significantly improves an LLM's self-correction ability using entirely self-generated data. To build SCoRe, we first show that variants of supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on offline model-generated correction traces are insufficient for instilling self-correction behavior. In particular, we observe that training via SFT either suffers from a distribution mismatch between the training data and the model's own responses or implicitly prefers only a certain mode of correction behavior that is often not effective at test time. SCoRe addresses these challenges by training under the model's own distribution of self-generated correction traces and using appropriate regularization to steer the learning process into learning a self-correction strategy that is effective at test time as opposed to simply fitting high-reward responses for a given prompt. This regularization prescribes running a first phase of RL on a base model to generate a policy initialization that is less susceptible to collapse and then using a reward bonus to amplify self-correction during training. When applied to Gemini 1.0 Pro and 1.5 Flash models, we find that SCoRe achieves state-of-the-art self-correction performance, improving the base models' self-correction by 15.6% and 9.1% respectively on the MATH and HumanEval benchmarks.

  • 18 authors
·
Sep 19, 2024 9

VLA-Corrector: Lightweight Detect-and-Correct Inference for Adaptive Action Horizon

Vision-Language-Action (VLA) foundation models have recently achieved strong progress in embodied intelligence. To reduce policy-call frequency while preserving temporal coherence, most generative policies adopt an action chunk mechanism, executing multiple future actions in an open-loop manner under a fixed action horizon. However, this "predict-then-blindly-execute" paradigm sacrifices closed-loop reactivity: in contact-rich physical interactions, even small local perturbations can rapidly amplify within the open-loop blind spot, leading to compounding errors and ultimately task failure. To address this limitation, we propose VLA-Corrector, a lightweight corrective inference framework for action-chunked VLA policies. Without modifying the backbone policy weights, VLA-Corrector introduces a lightweight Latent-space Vision Monitor (LVM) that continuously compares predicted and actual visual feature evolution, enabling online detection of visual dynamics deviations. Once persistent deviation is detected, the system triggers a truncation event, discards the remaining stale actions, and invokes corrective replanning via Online Gradient Guidance (OGG). The detect-and-correct mechanism of VLA-Corrector naturally induces an event-triggered adaptive action horizon: it preserves long-horizon execution when the current chunk remains reliable, and invokes short-horizon corrective replanning when execution begins to drift. In doing so, VLA-Corrector mitigates the trade-off imposed by static horizons between execution robustness and policy-call frequency. It can be integrated into different VLA models without further retraining the VLA backbone, interrupting compounding errors while preserving much of the efficiency benefit of action chunking and substantially improving robustness in long-horizon, contact-rich robotic manipulation tasks.

OmniAI-ZJU ZJU-OmniAI
·
Jul 1 4

Beyond Correctness: Harmonizing Process and Outcome Rewards through RL Training

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has emerged to be a predominant paradigm for mathematical reasoning tasks, offering stable improvements in reasoning ability. However, Outcome Reward Models (ORMs) in RLVR are too coarse-grained to distinguish flawed reasoning within correct answers or valid reasoning within incorrect answers. This lack of granularity introduces noisy and misleading gradients significantly and hinders further progress in reasoning process quality. While Process Reward Models (PRMs) offer fine-grained guidance for intermediate steps, they frequently suffer from inaccuracies and are susceptible to reward hacking. To resolve this dilemma, we introduce PRocess cOnsistency Filter (PROF), an effective data process curation method that harmonizes noisy, fine-grained process rewards with accurate, coarse-grained outcome rewards. Rather than naively blending PRM and ORM in the objective function (arXiv:archive/2506.18896), PROF leverages their complementary strengths through consistency-driven sample selection. Our approach retains correct responses with higher averaged process values and incorrect responses with lower averaged process values, while maintaining positive/negative training sample balance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method not only consistently improves the final accuracy over 4% compared to the blending approaches, but also strengthens the quality of intermediate reasoning steps. Codes and training recipes are available at https://github.com/Chenluye99/PROF.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 3, 2025 2

Pop Quiz! Do Pre-trained Code Models Possess Knowledge of Correct API Names?

Recent breakthroughs in pre-trained code models, such as CodeBERT and Codex, have shown their superior performance in various downstream tasks. The correctness and unambiguity of API usage among these code models are crucial for achieving desirable program functionalities, requiring them to learn various API fully qualified names structurally and semantically. Recent studies reveal that even state-of-the-art pre-trained code models struggle with suggesting the correct APIs during code generation. However, the reasons for such poor API usage performance are barely investigated. To address this challenge, we propose using knowledge probing as a means of interpreting code models, which uses cloze-style tests to measure the knowledge stored in models. Our comprehensive study examines a code model's capability of understanding API fully qualified names from two different perspectives: API call and API import. Specifically, we reveal that current code models struggle with understanding API names, with pre-training strategies significantly affecting the quality of API name learning. We demonstrate that natural language context can assist code models in locating Python API names and generalize Python API name knowledge to unseen data. Our findings provide insights into the limitations and capabilities of current pre-trained code models, and suggest that incorporating API structure into the pre-training process can improve automated API usage and code representations. This work provides significance for advancing code intelligence practices and direction for future studies. All experiment results, data and source code used in this work are available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7902072.

  • 7 authors
·
Sep 14, 2023

Generalized Correctness Models: Learning Calibrated and Model-Agnostic Correctness Predictors from Historical Patterns

Generating accurate and calibrated confidence estimates is critical for deploying LLMs in high-stakes or user-facing applications, and remains an open challenge. Prior research has often framed confidence as a problem of eliciting a model's "self-knowledge", i.e., the ability of an LLM to judge whether its own answers are correct; this approach implicitly assumes that there is some privileged information about the answer's correctness that is accessible to the model itself. However, our experiments reveal that an LLM attempting to predict the correctness of its own outputs generally performs no better than an unrelated LLM. Moreover, we hypothesize that a key factor in building a "Correctness Model" (CM) is exposure to a target model's historical predictions. We propose multiple methods to inject this historical correctness information, creating a Generalized Correctness Model (GCM). We first show that GCMs can be trained on the correctness data from many LLMs and learn patterns for correctness prediction applicable across datasets and models. We then use CMs as a lens for studying the source of correctness prediction ability and its generalization, systematically controlling their training data and finding that answer phrasing is a strong predictor for correctness. We further explore alternative methods of injecting history without training an LLM, finding that including history as in-context examples can help improve correctness prediction, and post-hoc calibration can provide complementary reductions in calibration error. We evaluate GCMs based on Qwen3-8B across 5 model families and the MMLU and TriviaQA datasets, as well as on a downstream selective prediction task, finding that reliable LLM confidence estimation is a generalizable and model-agnostic skill learned by systematically encoding correctness history rather than a model-specific skill reliant on self-introspection.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 29, 2025 2

Layout-Corrector: Alleviating Layout Sticking Phenomenon in Discrete Diffusion Model

Layout generation is a task to synthesize a harmonious layout with elements characterized by attributes such as category, position, and size. Human designers experiment with the placement and modification of elements to create aesthetic layouts, however, we observed that current discrete diffusion models (DDMs) struggle to correct inharmonious layouts after they have been generated. In this paper, we first provide novel insights into layout sticking phenomenon in DDMs and then propose a simple yet effective layout-assessment module Layout-Corrector, which works in conjunction with existing DDMs to address the layout sticking problem. We present a learning-based module capable of identifying inharmonious elements within layouts, considering overall layout harmony characterized by complex composition. During the generation process, Layout-Corrector evaluates the correctness of each token in the generated layout, reinitializing those with low scores to the ungenerated state. The DDM then uses the high-scored tokens as clues to regenerate the harmonized tokens. Layout-Corrector, tested on common benchmarks, consistently boosts layout-generation performance when in conjunction with various state-of-the-art DDMs. Furthermore, our extensive analysis demonstrates that the Layout-Corrector (1) successfully identifies erroneous tokens, (2) facilitates control over the fidelity-diversity trade-off, and (3) significantly mitigates the performance drop associated with fast sampling.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 25, 2024

Graphlets correct for the topological information missed by random walks

Random walks are widely used for mining networks due to the computational efficiency of computing them. For instance, graph representation learning learns a d-dimensional embedding space, so that the nodes that tend to co-occur on random walks (a proxy of being in the same network neighborhood) are close in the embedding space. Specific local network topology (i.e., structure) influences the co-occurrence of nodes on random walks, so random walks of limited length capture only partial topological information, hence diminishing the performance of downstream methods. We explicitly capture all topological neighborhood information and improve performance by introducing orbit adjacencies that quantify the adjacencies of two nodes as co-occurring on a given pair of graphlet orbits, which are symmetric positions on graphlets (small, connected, non-isomorphic, induced subgraphs of a large network). Importantly, we mathematically prove that random walks on up to k nodes capture only a subset of all the possible orbit adjacencies for up to k-node graphlets. Furthermore, we enable orbit adjacency-based analysis of networks by developing an efficient GRaphlet-orbit ADjacency COunter (GRADCO), which exhaustively computes all 28 orbit adjacency matrices for up to four-node graphlets. Note that four-node graphlets suffice, because real networks are usually small-world. In large networks on around 20,000 nodes, GRADCOcomputesthe28matricesinminutes. Onsixrealnetworksfromvarious domains, we compare the performance of node-label predictors obtained by using the network embeddings based on our orbit adjacencies to those based on random walks. We find that orbit adjacencies, which include those unseen by random walks, outperform random walk-based adjacencies, demonstrating the importance of the inclusion of the topological neighborhood information that is unseen by random walks.

  • 3 authors
·
May 23, 2024

When Correct Demonstrations Hurt: Rethinking the Role of Exemplars in In-Context Learning

In-context learning (ICL) is often motivated by the intuition that demonstrations help because they provide correct input-output examples. However, we reveal a counterintuitive phenomenon: correctness does not guarantee exemplar utility, and some correct demonstrations can even reduce ICL accuracy. To study this correctness-utility gap, we introduce task-preserving perturbations, where only the exemplar input is changed, while the example remains a correct instance of the same task. Concretely, each perturbed exemplar is assigned the target induced by the task mapping. This framework covers both label-updating perturbations, where task-relevant semantics change and targets are recomputed, and stricter target-preserving perturbations, where the original target remains valid. We formalize the resulting failure mode as contextual evidence shift: task-preserving perturbations can change the effective mixture of evidence used by the model for contextual inference, thereby separating exemplar correctness from exemplar utility. Across sentiment classification, logical reasoning, and math word problems, we find that task-preserving perturbed demonstrations can substantially degrade ICL performance, especially for smaller models, harder tasks, and higher perturbation ratios. Our results show that robust ICL requires evaluating not only whether demonstrations are correct, but also how they influence contextual inference. Code is available at https://github.com/Chenghao-Qiu/Task-Preserving-ICL.

  • 5 authors
·
May 24

When Correct Isn't Usable: Improving Structured Output Reliability in Small Language Models

Deployed language models must produce outputs that are both correct and format-compliant. We study this structured-output reliability gap using two mathematical benchmarks -- GSM8K and MATH -- as a controlled testbed: ground truth is unambiguous and the output contract is strict (JSON with required fields). We evaluate three 7-9B models under five prompting strategies and report output accuracy -- the joint event of mathematical correctness and valid JSON structure -- as the primary metric. A systematic format failure emerges: NAIVE prompting (no system prompt) achieves up to 85% task accuracy on GSM8K but 0% output accuracy across all models and datasets. REFERENCE prompting (a minimal hand-written JSON format prompt) fares little better, yielding 0% output accuracy for two of four models tested. Constrained decoding enforces syntactic validity but incurs 3.6x-8.2x latency overhead and in several settings degrades task performance substantially. To overcome this limitation, we developed AloLab, an iterative system-prompt optimizer (meta-agent: Claude Sonnet 4.5) requiring only black-box API access to the target model; it reaches 84-87% output accuracy on GSM8K and 34-40% on MATH across five independent runs per model, with 29/30 paired McNemar comparisons against the best static prompt significant at p < 0.05, at near-NAIVE inference latency and without model fine-tuning. The same format failure extends to GPT-4o (OpenAI, 2024), a proprietary closed-source model: REFERENCE achieves 0% output accuracy due to systematic markdown-fence wrapping, while AloLab reaches 95.2% [94.8, 95.6]. An ablation replacing the Sonnet 4.5 meta-agent with Claude 3 Haiku reduces mean output accuracy to 61.0% and increases run-to-run standard deviation from <1 pp to 21.8 pp, confirming that meta-agent capability is a primary driver of optimization quality.

  • 4 authors
·
May 3

Self-Correcting Large Language Models: Generation vs. Multiple Choice

Large language models have recently demonstrated remarkable abilities to self-correct their responses through iterative refinement, often referred to as self-consistency or self-reflection. However, the dynamics of this self-correction mechanism may differ substantially depending on whether the model is tasked with open-ended text generation or with selecting the most appropriate response from multiple predefined options. In this paper, we conduct a systematic investigation of these two paradigms by comparing performance trends and error-correction behaviors across various natural language understanding and reasoning tasks, covering language models of different scales and families. Our experimental results reveal distinct patterns of improvement and failure modes: While open-ended generation often benefits from the flexibility of re-interpretation and compositional refinement, multiple-choice selection can leverage clearer solution boundaries but may be limited by the provided options. This contrast also reflects the dual demands faced by emerging agentic LLM applications: effective agents must not only generate and refine open-ended plans or explanations, but also make reliable discrete choices when operating within constrained action spaces. Our findings, therefore, highlight that the design of self-correction mechanisms should take into account the interaction between task structure and output space, with implications for both knowledge-intensive reasoning and decision-oriented applications of LLMs.

  • 5 authors
·
Nov 12, 2025

Self-Correcting Decoding with Generative Feedback for Mitigating Hallucinations in Large Vision-Language Models

While recent Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) have shown remarkable performance in multi-modal tasks, they are prone to generating hallucinatory text responses that do not align with the given visual input, which restricts their practical applicability in real-world scenarios. In this work, inspired by the observation that the text-to-image generation process is the inverse of image-conditioned response generation in LVLMs, we explore the potential of leveraging text-to-image generative models to assist in mitigating hallucinations in LVLMs. We discover that generative models can offer valuable self-feedback for mitigating hallucinations at both the response and token levels. Building on this insight, we introduce self-correcting Decoding with Generative Feedback (DeGF), a novel training-free algorithm that incorporates feedback from text-to-image generative models into the decoding process to effectively mitigate hallucinations in LVLMs. Specifically, DeGF generates an image from the initial response produced by LVLMs, which acts as an auxiliary visual reference and provides self-feedback to verify and correct the initial response through complementary or contrastive decoding. Extensive experimental results validate the effectiveness of our approach in mitigating diverse types of hallucinations, consistently surpassing state-of-the-art methods across six benchmarks. Code is available at https://github.com/zhangce01/DeGF.

  • 10 authors
·
Feb 9, 2025

Self-Correction is More than Refinement: A Learning Framework for Visual and Language Reasoning Tasks

While Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have shown remarkable abilities in visual and language reasoning tasks, they invariably generate flawed responses. Self-correction that instructs models to refine their outputs presents a promising solution to this issue. Previous studies have mainly concentrated on Large Language Models (LLMs), while the self-correction abilities of VLMs, particularly concerning both visual and linguistic information, remain largely unexamined. This study investigates the self-correction capabilities of VLMs during both inference and fine-tuning stages. We introduce a Self-Correction Learning (SCL) approach that enables VLMs to learn from their self-generated self-correction data through Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) without relying on external feedback, facilitating self-improvement. Specifically, we collect preferred and disfavored samples based on the correctness of initial and refined responses, which are obtained by two-turn self-correction with VLMs during the inference stage. Experimental results demonstrate that although VLMs struggle to self-correct effectively during iterative inference without additional fine-tuning and external feedback, they can enhance their performance and avoid previous mistakes through preference fine-tuning when their self-generated self-correction data are categorized into preferred and disfavored samples. This study emphasizes that self-correction is not merely a refinement process; rather, it should enhance the reasoning abilities of models through additional training, enabling them to generate high-quality responses directly without further refinement.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 5, 2024

NoiseDiffusion: Correcting Noise for Image Interpolation with Diffusion Models beyond Spherical Linear Interpolation

Image interpolation based on diffusion models is promising in creating fresh and interesting images. Advanced interpolation methods mainly focus on spherical linear interpolation, where images are encoded into the noise space and then interpolated for denoising to images. However, existing methods face challenges in effectively interpolating natural images (not generated by diffusion models), thereby restricting their practical applicability. Our experimental investigations reveal that these challenges stem from the invalidity of the encoding noise, which may no longer obey the expected noise distribution, e.g., a normal distribution. To address these challenges, we propose a novel approach to correct noise for image interpolation, NoiseDiffusion. Specifically, NoiseDiffusion approaches the invalid noise to the expected distribution by introducing subtle Gaussian noise and introduces a constraint to suppress noise with extreme values. In this context, promoting noise validity contributes to mitigating image artifacts, but the constraint and introduced exogenous noise typically lead to a reduction in signal-to-noise ratio, i.e., loss of original image information. Hence, NoiseDiffusion performs interpolation within the noisy image space and injects raw images into these noisy counterparts to address the challenge of information loss. Consequently, NoiseDiffusion enables us to interpolate natural images without causing artifacts or information loss, thus achieving the best interpolation results.

  • 6 authors
·
Mar 13, 2024

Denoising LM: Pushing the Limits of Error Correction Models for Speech Recognition

Language models (LMs) have long been used to improve results of automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, but they are unaware of the errors that ASR systems make. Error correction models are designed to fix ASR errors, however, they showed little improvement over traditional LMs mainly due to the lack of supervised training data. In this paper, we present Denoising LM (DLM), which is a scaled error correction model trained with vast amounts of synthetic data, significantly exceeding prior attempts meanwhile achieving new state-of-the-art ASR performance. We use text-to-speech (TTS) systems to synthesize audio, which is fed into an ASR system to produce noisy hypotheses, which are then paired with the original texts to train the DLM. DLM has several key ingredients: (i) up-scaled model and data; (ii) usage of multi-speaker TTS systems; (iii) combination of multiple noise augmentation strategies; and (iv) new decoding techniques. With a Transformer-CTC ASR, DLM achieves 1.5% word error rate (WER) on test-clean and 3.3% WER on test-other on Librispeech, which to our knowledge are the best reported numbers in the setting where no external audio data are used and even match self-supervised methods which use external audio data. Furthermore, a single DLM is applicable to different ASRs, and greatly surpassing the performance of conventional LM based beam-search rescoring. These results indicate that properly investigated error correction models have the potential to replace conventional LMs, holding the key to a new level of accuracy in ASR systems.

  • 6 authors
·
May 24, 2024

Distilling and Retrieving Generalizable Knowledge for Robot Manipulation via Language Corrections

Today's robot policies exhibit subpar performance when faced with the challenge of generalizing to novel environments. Human corrective feedback is a crucial form of guidance to enable such generalization. However, adapting to and learning from online human corrections is a non-trivial endeavor: not only do robots need to remember human feedback over time to retrieve the right information in new settings and reduce the intervention rate, but also they would need to be able to respond to feedback that can be arbitrary corrections about high-level human preferences to low-level adjustments to skill parameters. In this work, we present Distillation and Retrieval of Online Corrections (DROC), a large language model (LLM)-based system that can respond to arbitrary forms of language feedback, distill generalizable knowledge from corrections, and retrieve relevant past experiences based on textual and visual similarity for improving performance in novel settings. DROC is able to respond to a sequence of online language corrections that address failures in both high-level task plans and low-level skill primitives. We demonstrate that DROC effectively distills the relevant information from the sequence of online corrections in a knowledge base and retrieves that knowledge in settings with new task or object instances. DROC outperforms other techniques that directly generate robot code via LLMs by using only half of the total number of corrections needed in the first round and requires little to no corrections after two iterations. We show further results, videos, prompts and code on https://sites.google.com/stanford.edu/droc .

  • 8 authors
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Nov 17, 2023

Data Generation for Post-OCR correction of Cyrillic handwriting

This paper introduces a novel approach to post-Optical Character Recognition Correction (POC) for handwritten Cyrillic text, addressing a significant gap in current research methodologies. This gap is due to the lack of large text corporas that provide OCR errors for further training of language-based POC models, which are demanding in terms of corpora size. Our study primarily focuses on the development and application of a synthetic handwriting generation engine based on B\'ezier curves. Such an engine generates highly realistic handwritten text in any amounts, which we utilize to create a substantial dataset by transforming Russian text corpora sourced from the internet. We apply a Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) model to this dataset to identify OCR errors, forming the basis for our POC model training. The correction model is trained on a 90-symbol input context, utilizing a pre-trained T5 architecture with a seq2seq correction task. We evaluate our approach on HWR200 and School_notebooks_RU datasets as they provide significant challenges in the HTR domain. Furthermore, POC can be used to highlight errors for teachers, evaluating student performance. This can be done simply by comparing sentences before and after correction, displaying differences in text. Our primary contribution lies in the innovative use of B\'ezier curves for Cyrillic text generation and subsequent error correction using a specialized POC model. We validate our approach by presenting Word Accuracy Rate (WAR) and Character Accuracy Rate (CAR) results, both with and without post-OCR correction, using real open corporas of handwritten Cyrillic text. These results, coupled with our methodology, are designed to be reproducible, paving the way for further advancements in the field of OCR and handwritten text analysis. Paper contributions can be found in https://github.com/dbrainio/CyrillicHandwritingPOC

  • 5 authors
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Nov 27, 2023

Evaluating Correctness and Faithfulness of Instruction-Following Models for Question Answering

Retriever-augmented instruction-following models are attractive alternatives to fine-tuned approaches for information-seeking tasks such as question answering (QA). By simply prepending retrieved documents in its input along with an instruction, these models can be adapted to various information domains and tasks without additional fine-tuning. While the model responses tend to be natural and fluent, the additional verbosity makes traditional QA evaluation metrics such as exact match (EM) and F1 unreliable for accurately quantifying model performance. In this work, we investigate the performance of instruction-following models across three information-seeking QA tasks. We use both automatic and human evaluation to evaluate these models along two dimensions: 1) how well they satisfy the user's information need (correctness), and 2) whether they produce a response based on the provided knowledge (faithfulness). Guided by human evaluation and analysis, we highlight the shortcomings of traditional metrics for both correctness and faithfulness. We then propose simple token-overlap based and model-based metrics that reflect the true performance of these models. Our analysis reveals that instruction-following models are competitive, and sometimes even outperform fine-tuned models for correctness. However, these models struggle to stick to the provided knowledge and often hallucinate in their responses. We hope our work encourages a more holistic evaluation of instruction-following models for QA. Our code and data is available at https://github.com/McGill-NLP/instruct-qa

  • 5 authors
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Jul 31, 2023

BERT-APC: A Reference-free Framework for Automatic Pitch Correction via Musical Context Inference

Automatic Pitch Correction (APC) enhances vocal recordings by aligning pitch deviations with the intended musical notes. However, existing APC systems either rely on reference pitches, which limits their practical applicability, or employ simple pitch estimation algorithms that often fail to preserve expressiveness and naturalness. We propose BERT-APC, a novel reference-free APC framework that corrects pitch errors while maintaining the natural expressiveness of vocal performances. In BERT-APC, a novel stationary pitch predictor first estimates the perceived pitch of each note from the detuned singing voice. A context-aware note pitch predictor estimates the intended pitch sequence by leveraging a music language model repurposed to incorporate musical context. Finally, a note-level correction algorithm fixes pitch errors while preserving intentional pitch deviations for emotional expression. In addition, we introduce a learnable data augmentation strategy that improves the robustness of the music language model by simulating realistic detuning patterns. Compared to two recent singing voice transcription models, BERT-APC demonstrated superior performance in note pitch prediction, outperforming the second-best model, ROSVOT, by 10.49%p on highly detuned samples in terms of the raw pitch accuracy. In the MOS test, BERT-APC achieved the highest score of 4.32 pm 0.15, which is significantly higher than those of the widely-used commercial APC tools, AutoTune (3.22 pm 0.18) and Melodyne (3.08 pm 0.18), while maintaining a comparable ability to preserve expressive nuances. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first APC model that leverages a music language model to achieve reference-free pitch correction with symbolic musical context. The corrected audio samples of BERT-APC are available online.

S$^3$c-Math: Spontaneous Step-level Self-correction Makes Large Language Models Better Mathematical Reasoners

Self-correction is a novel method that can stimulate the potential reasoning abilities of large language models (LLMs). It involves detecting and correcting errors during the inference process when LLMs solve reasoning problems. However, recent works do not regard self-correction as a spontaneous and intrinsic capability of LLMs. Instead, such correction is achieved through post-hoc generation, external knowledge introduction, multi-model collaboration, and similar techniques. In this paper, we propose a series of mathematical LLMs called S^3c-Math, which are able to perform Spontaneous Step-level Self-correction for Mathematical reasoning. This capability helps LLMs to recognize whether their ongoing inference tends to contain errors and simultaneously correct these errors to produce a more reliable response. We proposed a method, which employs a step-level sampling approach to construct step-wise self-correction data for achieving such ability. Additionally, we implement a training strategy that uses above constructed data to equip LLMs with spontaneous step-level self-correction capacities. Our data and methods have been demonstrated to be effective across various foundation LLMs, consistently showing significant progress in evaluations on GSM8K, MATH, and other mathematical benchmarks. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to introduce the spontaneous step-level self-correction ability of LLMs in mathematical reasoning.

  • 8 authors
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Sep 2, 2024

Think Twice Before You Act: Enhancing Agent Behavioral Safety with Thought Correction

LLM-based agents solve complex tasks through iterative reasoning, tool use, and environment interaction, where each intermediate thought directly shapes subsequent actions. Small deviations in these thoughts can therefore propagate into unsafe behaviors, yet existing guardrails typically operate only on final outputs or require intrusive model modifications. We introduce Thought-Aligner, a lightweight plug-in safety model that performs causal correction on unsafe thoughts before action execution, without altering the underlying agent. The corrected thoughts are fed back into the agent, steering its decision process and tool use toward safer trajectories. Because it operates solely at the thought level, Thought-Aligner is model-agnostic and can be integrated into diverse agent frameworks. We train Thought-Aligner via two-stage contrastive learning on paired safe and unsafe thoughts generated across ten risk scenarios. Experiments on diverse agent-safety benchmarks and six LLMs show that Thought-Aligner increases behavioral safety from about 50% without protection to around 90% on average, exceeding state-of-the-art guardrails by roughly 23%, while also improving helpfulness by about 5%. The method incurs low per-step latency and minimal overhead, enabling scalable and practical deployment. We publicly release Thought-Aligner-7B at https://huggingface.co/WhitzardAgent/Thought-Aligner-7B.

  • 5 authors
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May 25

Self-Correcting VLA: Online Action Refinement via Sparse World Imagination

Standard vision-language-action (VLA) models rely on fitting statistical data priors, limiting their robust understanding of underlying physical dynamics. Reinforcement learning enhances physical grounding through exploration yet typically relies on external reward signals that remain isolated from the agent's internal states. World action models have emerged as a promising paradigm that integrates imagination and control to enable predictive planning. However, they rely on implicit context modeling, lacking explicit mechanisms for self-improvement. To solve these problems, we propose Self-Correcting VLA (SC-VLA), which achieve self-improvement by intrinsically guiding action refinement through sparse imagination. We first design sparse world imagination by integrating auxiliary predictive heads to forecast current task progress and future trajectory trends, thereby constraining the policy to encode short-term physical evolution. Then we introduce the online action refinement module to reshape progress-dependent dense rewards, adjusting trajectory orientation based on the predicted sparse future states. Evaluations on challenging robot manipulation tasks from simulation benchmarks and real-world settings demonstrate that SC-VLA achieve state-of-the-art performance, yielding the highest task throughput with 16% fewer steps and a 9% higher success rate than the best-performing baselines, alongside a 14% gain in real-world experiments. Code is available at https://github.com/Kisaragi0/SC-VLA.

  • 7 authors
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Feb 25

Beyond Correctness: Exposing LLM-generated Logical Flaws in Reasoning via Multi-step Automated Theorem Proving

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, leading to their adoption in high-stakes domains such as healthcare, law, and scientific research. However, their reasoning often contains subtle logical errors masked by fluent language, posing significant risks for critical applications. While existing approaches like fact-checking, self-consistency methods, and rule-based validation provide partial solutions, they fail to detect complex logical flaws in multi-step reasoning. To overcome these challenges, we present MATP, an evaluation framework for systematically verifying LLM reasoning via Multi-step Automatic Theorem Proving. MATP translates natural language reasoning into First-Order Logic (FOL) and applies automated theorem provers to assess step-by-step logical validity. This approach identifies hidden logical errors and provides fine-grained classifications of reasoning correctness. Evaluations on a benchmark comprising 10,830 reasoning instances generated by 10 LLMs across tasks from PrOntoQA-OOD, ProofWriter, and FOLIO show that MATP surpasses prompting-based baselines by over 42 percentage points in reasoning step verification. It further reveals model-level disparities, with reasoning models generating more logically coherent outputs than general models. These results demonstrate MATP's potential to enhance the trustworthiness of LLM-generated reasoning.

  • 7 authors
·
Dec 28, 2025

LLM4EFFI: Leveraging Large Language Models to Enhance Code Efficiency and Correctness

Large Language Models (LLMs), particularly Code LLMs, have demonstrated impressive performance in code generation. Current research primarily focuses on the correctness of generated code, while efficiency remains less explored. Recent works have focused on modifying the initial version of the code to improve its efficiency. However, such refinements are limited by the algorithmic design and overall logic of the initial code, resulting in only incremental improvements. In contrast, when human developers write high-quality code, they typically begin by designing several potential solutions at the logical level, evaluating various algorithms and their complexities, and then proceeding to implement and optimize the solution. In this study, we introduce \tool: Large Language Model for Code Efficiency, a novel framework that enables LLMs to generate code that balances both efficiency and correctness. Specifically, \tool divides the efficiency optimization process into two domains: algorithmic exploration in the logic domain and implementation optimization in the code domain. The correctness of the code is then guaranteed through a synthetic test case refinement process. This approach, which prioritizes efficiency before ensuring correctness, offers a new paradigm for efficient code generation. Experiments demonstrate that \tool consistently improves both efficiency and correctness, achieving new state-of-the-art performance in code efficiency benchmarks across various LLM backbones.

  • 7 authors
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Feb 17, 2025

Lyra: Orchestrating Dual Correction in Automated Theorem Proving

Large Language Models (LLMs) present an intriguing avenue for exploration in the field of formal theorem proving. Nevertheless, their full potential, particularly concerning the mitigation of hallucinations and refinement through prover error messages, remains an area that has yet to be thoroughly investigated. To enhance the effectiveness of LLMs in the field, we introduce the Lyra, a new framework that employs two distinct correction mechanisms: Tool Correction (TC) and Conjecture Correction (CC). To implement Tool Correction in the post-processing of formal proofs, we leverage prior knowledge to utilize predefined prover tools (e.g., Sledgehammer) for guiding the replacement of incorrect tools. Tool Correction significantly contributes to mitigating hallucinations, thereby improving the overall accuracy of the proof. In addition, we introduce Conjecture Correction, an error feedback mechanism designed to interact with prover to refine formal proof conjectures with prover error messages. Compared to the previous refinement framework, the proposed Conjecture Correction refines generation with instruction but does not collect paired (generation, error & refinement) prompts. Our method has achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on both miniF2F validation (48.0% -> 55.3%) and test (45.5% -> 51.2%). We also present 3 IMO problems solved by Lyra. We believe Tool Correction (post-process for hallucination mitigation) and Conjecture Correction (subgoal adjustment from interaction with environment) could provide a promising avenue for future research in this field.

  • 9 authors
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Sep 27, 2023

What types of chemical problems benefit from density-corrected DFT? A probe using an extensive and chemically diverse test suite

For the large and chemically diverse GMTKN55 benchmark suite, we have studied the performance of density-corrected density functional theory (HF-DFT), compared to self-consistent DFT, for several pure and hybrid GGA and meta-GGA exchange-correlation (XC) functionals (PBE, BLYP, TPSS, SCAN) as a function of the percentage of HF exchange in the hybrid. The D4 empirical dispersion correction has been added throughout. For subsets dominated by dynamical correlation -- particularly noncovalent interaction subsets -- HF-DFT is highly beneficial, particularly at low HF exchange percentages. For subsets with significant static correlation (i.e., where a Hartree-Fock determinant is not a good zero-order wavefunction), HF-DFT may do more harm than good. While the self-consistent series show optima at or near 37.5% (i.e., 3/8) for all four XC functionals -- consistent with Grimme's proposal of the PBE38 functional -- HF-BnLYP-D4, HF-PBEn-D4, and HF-TPSSn-D4 all exhibit minima nearer 25% (i.e., 1/4). Intriguingly, for HF-SCANn-D4, the minimum is near 10%, but the weighted mean absolute error (WTMAD2) for GMTKN55 is only barely lower than that of HF-SCAN-D4 (i.e., where the post-HF step is a pure meta-GGA). The latter becomes an attractive option, only slightly more costly than pure Hartree-Fock, and devoid of adjustable parameters other than the three in the dispersion correction. Moreover, its WTMAD2 is only surpassed by the highly empirical M06-2X and by the combinatorically optimized empirical range-separated hybrids wB97X-V and wB97M-V.

  • 2 authors
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Oct 4, 2020

MultiWOZ 2.1: A Consolidated Multi-Domain Dialogue Dataset with State Corrections and State Tracking Baselines

MultiWOZ 2.0 (Budzianowski et al., 2018) is a recently released multi-domain dialogue dataset spanning 7 distinct domains and containing over 10,000 dialogues. Though immensely useful and one of the largest resources of its kind to-date, MultiWOZ 2.0 has a few shortcomings. Firstly, there is substantial noise in the dialogue state annotations and dialogue utterances which negatively impact the performance of state-tracking models. Secondly, follow-up work (Lee et al., 2019) has augmented the original dataset with user dialogue acts. This leads to multiple co-existent versions of the same dataset with minor modifications. In this work we tackle the aforementioned issues by introducing MultiWOZ 2.1. To fix the noisy state annotations, we use crowdsourced workers to re-annotate state and utterances based on the original utterances in the dataset. This correction process results in changes to over 32% of state annotations across 40% of the dialogue turns. In addition, we fix 146 dialogue utterances by canonicalizing slot values in the utterances to the values in the dataset ontology. To address the second problem, we combined the contributions of the follow-up works into MultiWOZ 2.1. Hence, our dataset also includes user dialogue acts as well as multiple slot descriptions per dialogue state slot. We then benchmark a number of state-of-the-art dialogue state tracking models on the MultiWOZ 2.1 dataset and show the joint state tracking performance on the corrected state annotations. We are publicly releasing MultiWOZ 2.1 to the community, hoping that this dataset resource will allow for more effective models across various dialogue subproblems to be built in the future.

  • 10 authors
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Jul 2, 2019