mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Verify Before You Commit: Towards Faithful Reasoning in LLM Agents via Self-Auditing

arXiv 2604.08401 ↗First posted 9 Apr 2026cs.AI cs.CLcited by 7

On the map: LLM reasoning → Reasoning for agents, planning and code

also in 1 more
Abstract (arXiv)

In large language model (LLM) agents, reasoning trajectories are treated as reliable internal beliefs for guiding actions and updating memory. However, coherent reasoning can still violate logical or evidential constraints, allowing unsupported beliefs repeatedly stored and propagated across decision steps, leading to systematic behavioral drift in long-horizon agentic systems. Most existing strategies rely on the consensus mechanism, conflating agreement with faithfulness. In this paper, inspired by the vulnerability of unfaithful intermediate reasoning trajectories, we propose Self-Audited Verified Reasoning (textscSAVeR), a novel framework that enforces verification over internal belief states within the agent before action commitment, achieving faithful reasoning. Concretely, we structurally generate persona-based diverse candidate beliefs for selection under a faithfulness-relevant structure space. To achieve reasoning faithfulness, we perform adversarial auditing to localize violations and repair through constraint-guided minimal interventions under verifiable acceptance criteria. Extensive experiments on six benchmark datasets demonstrate that our approach consistently improves reasoning faithfulness while preserving competitive end-task performance.

Key facts. Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 8 of its 58 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 9 Apr 2026.

Builds on

8 of 58 references.

Closest ancestors · 1

Same direction, newest first

  1. 2025AgentsNet: Coordination and Collaborative Reasoning in Multi-Agent LLMs11 Jul

Other references · 7

  1. 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,715
  2. 2023LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Modelscited by 14,132
  3. 2025Qwen2.5-VL Technical Reportcited by 5,587
  4. 2025Is Chain-of-Thought Reasoning of LLMs a Mirage? A Data Distribution Lenscited by 43
  5. 2025A Survey of Reasoning and Agentic Systems in Time Series with Large Language Modelscited by 21
  6. 2025QA-Dragon: Query-Aware Dynamic RAG System for Knowledge-Intensive Visual Question Answeringcited by 6
  7. 2025Multi-agent Undercover Gaming: Hallucination Removal via Counterfactual Test for Multimodal Reasoningcited by 4

Built on by

Cited by year (2026 to 14 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 7.

7 papers.

Similar, not cited

Close in wording, no citation either way

  1. 2026Project Ariadne: A Structural Causal Framework for Auditing Faithfulness in LLM Agents
  2. 2025Towards Trustworthy Multi-Turn LLM Agents via Behavioral Guidance
  3. 2025Deception in LLMs: Self-Preservation and Autonomous Goals in Large Language Models
  4. 2026Doing What They Say, Not What They Reason: Locating the Faithfulness Gap in LLM Agents
  5. 2025SIEVE: Selective Integrity Verification and Escalation for Defending LLM Agents against Indirect Prompt Injection
  6. 2025From Solving to Verifying: A Unified Objective for Robust Reasoning in LLMs
  7. 2026Can We Break LLMs Out of Self-Loops? Fine-Grained Reasoning Control with Activation Steering
  8. 2025Trust, But Verify: A Self-Verification Approach to Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards