mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Self-Verification Dilemma: Experience-Driven Suppression of Overused Checking in LLM Reasoning

arXiv 2602.03485 ↗First posted 3 Feb 2026cs.CL cs.AI cs.LGcited by 3

On the map: LLM reasoning → Test-time compute and efficient thinking

Abstract (arXiv)

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) achieve strong performance by generating long reasoning traces with reflection. Through a large-scale empirical analysis, we find that a substantial fraction of reflective steps consist of self-verification (recheck) that repeatedly confirm intermediate results. These rechecks occur frequently across models and benchmarks, yet the vast majority are confirmatory rather than corrective, rarely identifying errors and altering reasoning outcomes. This reveals a mismatch between how often self-verification is activated and how often it is actually useful. Motivated by this, we propose a novel, experience-driven test-time framework that reduces the overused verification. Our method detects the activation of recheck behavior, consults an offline experience pool of past verification outcomes, and estimates whether a recheck is likely unnecessary via efficient retrieval. When historical experience suggests unnecessary, a suppression signal redirects the model to proceed. Across multiple model and benchmarks, our approach reduces token usage up to 20.3% while maintaining the accuracy, and in some datasets even yields accuracy improvements.

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Test-time compute and efficient thinking, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 20 of its 41 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 3 Feb 2026.

Builds on

20 of 41 references.

Closest ancestors · 10

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025First Try Matters: Revisiting the Role of Reflection in Reasoning Models9 Oct
  2. 2025Metacognitive Reuse: Turning Recurring LLM Reasoning Into Concise Behaviors16 Sep
  3. 2025gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card8 Aug
  4. 2025OThink-R1: Intrinsic Fast/Slow Thinking Mode Switching for Over-Reasoning Mitigation3 Jun
  5. 2025Done Is Better than Perfect: Unlocking Efficient Reasoning by Structured Multi-Turn Decomposition26 May
  6. 2025PATS: Process-Level Adaptive Thinking Mode Switching25 May
  7. 2025Not All Thoughts are Generated Equal: Efficient LLM Reasoning via Multi-Turn Reinforcement Learning17 May
  8. 2025Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models2 May
  9. 2025Understanding Aha Moments: from External Observations to Internal Mechanisms3 Apr
  10. 2025Stop Overthinking: A Survey on Efficient Reasoning for Large Language Models20 Mar

Other references · 10

  1. 2019RoBERTa: A Robustly Optimized BERT Pretraining Approachcited by 13,266
  2. 2025Qwen3 Technical Reportcited by 8,195
  3. 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,146
  4. 2021Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Datasetcited by 5,203
  5. 2024OpenAI o1 System Cardcited by 1,220
  6. 2024OlympiadBench: A Challenging Benchmark for Promoting AGI with Olympiad-Level Bilingual Multimodal Scientific Problemscited by 1,099
  7. 2025OpenAI GPT-5 System Cardcited by 910
  8. 2025Search-o1: Agentic Search-Enhanced Large Reasoning Modelscited by 423
  9. 2025AgentEvolver: Towards Efficient Self-Evolving Agent Systemcited by 77
  10. 2025Early Stopping Chain-of-thoughts in Large Language Modelscited by 19

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026ReFlect: An Effective Harness System for Complex Long-Horizon LLM Reasoning
  2. 2026Beyond Accuracy: Decomposing the Reasoning Efficiency of LLMs
  3. 2023A Closer Look at the Self-Verification Abilities of Large Language Models in Logical Reasoning
  4. 2024Learning to Check: Unleashing Potentials for Self-Correction in Large Language Models
  5. 2025Double-Checker: Enhancing Reasoning of Slow-Thinking LLMs via Self-Critical Fine-Tuning
  6. 2026A Temporal Reasoning Benchmarking Framework for LRMs via Difficulty-controlled and Dynamic Test Generation
  7. 2025Self-Reflective Generation at Test Time
  8. 2026Reasoning Shift: How Context Silently Shortens LLM Reasoning