Scalable Oversight for Superhuman AI via Recursive Self-Critiquing

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission14762 Authors

Keywords: Scalable Oversight, Recursive Self-Critiquing

Abstract:

As AI capabilities increasingly surpass human proficiency in complex tasks, current alignment techniques including SFT and RLHF face fundamental challenges in ensuring reliable oversight.
These methods rely on direct human assessment and become untenable when AI outputs exceed human cognitive thresholds.
In response to this challenge, we explore two hypotheses: (1) \textit{critique of critique can be easier than critique itself}, extending the widely-accepted observation that verification is easier than generation to the critique domain, as critique itself is a specialized form of generation; (2) \textit{this difficulty relationship is recursively held}, suggesting that when direct evaluation is infeasible, performing high-order critiques (e.g., critique of critique of critique) offers a more tractable supervision pathway.
To examine these hypotheses, we perform Human-Human, Human-AI, and AI-AI experiments across multiple tasks.
Our results demonstrate encouraging evidence supporting these hypotheses and suggest that \textbf{\textit{recursive self-critiquing}} is a promising direction for scalable oversight.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

Submission Number: 14762