metacognitive experience
Monitor-Generate-Verify (MGV): Formalising Metacognitive Theory for Language Model Reasoning
Test-time reasoning architectures such as those following the Generate-Verify paradigm, where a model iteratively refines or verifies its own generated outputs, prioritise generation and verification but exclude the monitoring processes that determine when and how reasoning should begin. This omission may contribute to the prefix dominance trap, in which models commit early to suboptimal reasoning paths and seldom recover, yielding roughly 20% accuracy loss. We address this architectural gap by proposing the Monitor-Generate-Verify (MGV) framework, a computational translation of Flavell's and Nelson and Narens' metacognitive theories that preserves their psychological detail. MGV extends the Generate-Verify paradigm by adding explicit monitoring that captures metacognitive experiences (from difficulty assessments to confidence judgements) before generation begins and refines future monitoring through verification feedback. Though we present no empirical validation, MGV provides a vocabulary for diagnosing component-level failures in reasoning systems, suggests specific architectural interventions for future designs, and identifies connections to resource-rational analysis that may ground its mechanisms in normative principles.
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How Metacognitive Architectures Remember Their Own Thoughts: A Systematic Review
Nolte, Robin, Pomarlan, Mihai, Janssen, Ayden, Beßler, Daniel, Javanmardi, Kamyar, Jongebloed, Sascha, Porzel, Robert, Bateman, John, Beetz, Michael, Malaka, Rainer
Inspired by human cognition, metacognition has gained significant attention for its potential to enhance autonomy, adaptability, and robust learning in artificial agents. Yet research on Computational Metacognitive Architectures (CMAs) remains fragmented: diverse theories, terminologies, and design choices have led to disjointed developments and limited comparability across systems. Existing overviews and surveys often remain at a broad, conceptual level, making it difficult to synthesize deeper insights into the underlying algorithms and representations, and their respective success. We address this gap by performing an explorative systematic review of how CMAs model, store, remember and process their metacognitive experiences, one of Flavell's (1979) three foundational components of metacognition. Following this organizing principle, we identify 35 CMAs that feature episodic introspective data ranging from symbolic event traces to sub-symbolic arousal metrics. We consider different aspects - ranging from the underlying psychological theories to the content and structure of collected data, to the algorithms used and evaluation results - and derive a unifying perspective that allows us to compare in depth how different Computational Metacognitive Architectures (CMAs) leverage metacognitive experiences for tasks such as error diagnosis, self-repair, and goal-driven learning. Our findings highlight both the promise of metacognitive experiences - in boosting adaptability, explainability, and overall system performance - and the persistent lack of shared standards or evaluation benchmarks.
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