Goto

Collaborating Authors

 reflection


Auditing Meta-Cognitive Hallucinations in Reasoning Large Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems

The development of Reasoning Large Language Models (RLLMs) has significantly improved multi-step reasoning capabilities, but it has also made hallucination problems more frequent and harder to eliminate. While existing approaches address hallucination through external knowledge integration, model parameter analysis, or self-verification mechanisms, they fail to provide a comprehensive insight into how hallucinations emerge and evolve throughout the reasoning chain. In this work, we investigate hallucination causality under constrained knowledge domains by auditing the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) trajectory and assessing the model's cognitive confidence in potentially erroneous or biased claims. Analysis reveals that in long-CoT settings, RLLMs may iteratively reinforce biases and errors through flawed reflective processes, ultimately inducing hallucinated reasoning paths. Counterintuitively, even with interventions at hallucination origins, reasoning chains display pronounced "chain disloyalty", resisting correction and sustaining flawed trajectories. We further point out that existing hallucination detection methods are less reliable and interpretable than previously assumed, especially in complex multi-step reasoning contexts. Unlike circuit tracing that requires access to model parameters, our auditing enables more interpretable long-chain hallucination attribution in black-box settings, demonstrating stronger generalizability and practical utility. Our code is available at this link.


SRPO: Enhancing Multimodal LLMReasoning via Reflection-Aware Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising capabilities in reasoning tasks, yet still struggle significantly with complex problems requiring explicit self-reflection and self-correction, especially compared to their unimodal text-based counterparts. Existing reflection methods are simplistic and struggle to generate meaningful, instructive feedback, as the reasoning ability and knowledge limits of pre-trained models are largely fixed during initial training. To overcome these challenges, we propose multimodal Self-Reflection enhanced reasoning with Group Relative Policy Optimization SRPO, a two-stage reflection-aware reinforcement learning (RL) framework explicitly designed to enhance multimodal LLM reasoning. In the first stage, we construct a high-quality, reflection-focused dataset under the guidance of an advanced MLLM, which generates reflections based on initial responses to help the policy model to learn both reasoning and self-reflection. In the second stage, we introduce a novel reward mechanism within the GRPO framework that encourages concise and cognitively meaningful reflection while avoiding redundancy.


Towards Reasoning Centric Benchmark for Aerial Anomaly Understanding

Neural Information Processing Systems

While unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer wide-area, high-altitude coverage for anomaly detection, they face challenges such as dynamic viewpoints, scale variations, and complex scenes. Existing datasets and methods, mainly designed for fixed ground-level views, struggle to adapt to these conditions, leading to significant performance drops in drone-view scenarios. To bridge this gap, we introduce A2Seek (Aerial Anomaly Seek), a large-scale, reasoning-centric benchmark dataset for aerial anomaly understanding. This dataset covers various scenarios and environmental conditions, providing high-resolution real-world aerial videos with detailed annotations, including anomaly categories, frame-level timestamps, region-level bounding boxes, and natural language explanations for causal reasoning. Building on this dataset, we propose A2Seek-R1, a novel reasoning framework that generalizes R1-style strategies to aerial anomaly understanding, enabling a deeper understanding of "Where" anomalies occur and "Why" they happen in aerial frames.


Temperature is All You Need for Generalization in Langevin Dynamics and other Markov Processes

Neural Information Processing Systems

We analyze the generalization gap (gap between the training and test errors) when training a potentially over-parametrized model using a Markovian stochastic training algorithm, initialized from some distribution ฮธ0 p0. We focus on Langevin dynamics with a positive temperature ฮฒ 1, i.e. gradient descent on a training loss Lwith infinitesimal step size, perturbed with ฮฒ 1-variances Gaussian noise, and lightly regularized or bounded. There, we bound the generalization gap, at any time during training, by p (ฮฒEL(ฮธ0)+ln(1/ฮด))/N with probability 1 ฮด over the dataset, where N is the sample size, and EL(ฮธ0) = O(1)with standard initialization scaling. In contrast to previous guarantees, we have no dependence on either training time or reliance on mixing, nor a dependence on dimensionality, gradient norms, or any other properties of the loss or model. This guarantee follows from a general analysis of any Markov process-based training that has a Gibbs-style stationary distribution. The proof is surprisingly simple, once we observe that the marginal distribution divergence from initialization remains bounded, as implied by a generalized second law of thermodynamics.


Can NeRFs " See " without Cameras?

Neural Information Processing Systems

Neural Radiance Fields (NeRFs) have been remarkably successful at synthesizing novel views of 3D scenes by optimizing a volumetric scene function. This scene function models how optical rays bring color information from a 3D object to the camera pixels. Radio frequency (RF) or audio signals can also be viewed as a vehicle for delivering information about the environment to a sensor. However, unlike camera pixels, an RF/audio sensor receives a mixture of signals that contain many environmental reflections (also called "multipath"). Is it still possible to infer the environment using such multipath signals? We show that with redesign, NeRFs can be taught to learn from multipath signals, and thereby "see" the environment. As a grounding application, we aim to infer the indoor floorplan of a home from sparse WiFi measurements made at multiple locations inside the home. Although a difficult inverse problem, our implicitly learnt floorplans look promising, and enables forward applications, such as indoor signal prediction and basic ray tracing.



Non-Line-of-Sight 3DReconstruction with Radar

Neural Information Processing Systems

Seeing hidden structures and objects around corners is critical for robots operating in complex, cluttered environments. Existing methods, however, are limited to detecting and tracking hidden objects rather than reconstructing the occluded full scene.


ChartSketcher Reasoning with Feedback and Reflection for Chart Understanding

Neural Information Processing Systems

Charts are high-density visualization carriers for complex data, serving as a crucial medium for information extraction and analysis. Automated chart understanding poses significant challenges to existing multimodal large language models (MLLMs) due to the need for precise and complex visual reasoning. Current step-by-step reasoning models primarily focus on text-based logical reasoning for chart understanding. However, they struggle to refine or correct their reasoning when errors stem from flawed visual understanding, as they lack the ability to leverage multimodal interaction for deeper comprehension. Inspired by human cognitive behavior, we propose ChartSketcher, a multimodal feedback-driven stepby-step reasoning method designed to address these limitations. ChartSketcher is a chart understanding model that employs Sketch-CoT, enabling MLLMs to annotate intermediate reasoning steps directly onto charts using a programmatic sketching library, iteratively feeding these visual annotations back into the reasoning process. This mechanism enables the model to visually ground its reasoning and refine its understanding over multiple steps. We employ a two-stage training strategy: a cold start phase to learn sketch-based reasoning patterns, followed by off-policy reinforcement learning to enhance reflection and generalization. Experiments demonstrate that ChartSketcher achieves promising performance on chart understanding benchmarks and general vision tasks, providing an interactive and interpretable approach to chart comprehension.


Self-Verifying Reflection Helps Transformers with CoTReasoning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Advanced large language models (LLMs) frequently reflect in reasoning chainof-thoughts (CoTs), where they self-verify the correctness of current solutions and explore alternatives. However, given recent findings that LLMs detect limited errors in CoTs, how reflection contributes to empirical improvements remains unclear. To analyze this issue, in this paper, we present a minimalistic reasoning framework to support basic self-verifying reflection for small transformers without natural language, which ensures analytic clarity and reduces the cost of comprehensive experiments. Theoretically, we prove that self-verifying reflection guarantees improvements if verification errors are properly bounded. Experimentally, we show that tiny transformers, with only a few million parameters, benefit from self-verification in both training and reflective execution, reaching remarkable LLM-level performance in integer multiplication and Sudoku. Similar to LLM results, we find that reinforcement learning (RL) improves in-distribution performance and incentivizes frequent reflection for tiny transformers, yet RL mainly optimizes shallow statistical patterns without faithfully reducing verification errors.


SRPO: Enhancing Multimodal LLM Reasoning via Reflection-Aware Reinforcement Learning

Neural Information Processing Systems

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have shown promising capabilities in reasoning tasks, yet still struggle significantly with complex problems requiring explicit self-reflection and self-correction, especially compared to their unimodal text-based counterparts. Existing reflection methods are simplistic and struggle to generate meaningful, instructive feedback, as the reasoning ability and knowledge limits of pre-trained models are largely fixed during initial training.