Self-Reflective Generation at Test Time

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission3413 Authors

Keywords: Test-Time Scaling, Self-Reflection

Abstract:

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly solve complex reasoning tasks via long chain-of-thought, but their forward-only autoregressive generation process is fragile; early token errors can cascade, which creates a clear need for self-reflection mechanisms. However, existing self-reflection either performs revisions over full drafts or learns self-correction via expensive training, both fundamentally reactive and inefficient. To address this, we propose Self-Reflective Generation at Test Time (SRGen), a lightweight test-time framework that reflects before generating at uncertain points. During token generation, SRGen utilizes dynamic entropy thresholding to identify high-uncertainty tokens. For each identified token, it trains a specific corrective vector, which fully exploits the already generated context for a self-reflective generation to correct the token probability distribution. By retrospectively analyzing the partial output, this self-reflection enables more trustworthy decisions, thereby significantly reducing the probability of errors at highly uncertain points. Evaluated on challenging mathematical reasoning benchmarks and a diverse set of LLMs, SRGen can significantly strengthen model reasoning.
Moreover, our findings position SRGen as a plug-and-play method that integrates reflection into the generation process for reliable LLM reasoning, achieving consistent gains with bounded overhead and can be combined with other training-time (e.g., RLHF) and test-time (e.g., SLOT) techniques.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Language Models

Research Area Keywords: chain-of-thought,inference methods,calibration/uncertainty

Contribution Types: NLP engineering experiment, Approaches low compute settings-efficiency, Theory

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 3413