Two Heads Are Better Than One: Dual-Model Verbal Reflection at Inference-Time

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Li, Jiazheng, Zhou, Yuxiang, Lu, Junru, Tyen, Gladys, Gui, Lin, Aloisi, Cesare, He, Yulan
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Li, Jiazheng
Zhou, Yuxiang
Lu, Junru
Tyen, Gladys
Gui, Lin
Aloisi, Cesare
He, Yulan
author_facet Li, Jiazheng
Zhou, Yuxiang
Lu, Junru
Tyen, Gladys
Gui, Lin
Aloisi, Cesare
He, Yulan
contents Although preference optimization methods have improved reasoning performance in Large Language Models (LLMs), they often lack transparency regarding why one reasoning outcome is preferred over another. This limitation is especially critical in Automated Student Answer Scoring (ASAS), where explainability is essential to justify assessment outcomes. Verbal reinforcement learning offers the potential to generate explicit reflection, but it tends to produce superficial critiques that can harm assessment performance. Existing LLMs also struggle to reliably detect subtle reasoning errors in ASAS tasks. Moreover, manually identifying intermediate reasoning errors is expensive and difficult to scale. To address these challenges, we introduce a contrastive reflection synthesis pipeline that generates precise verbal feedback by identifying discrepancies in structure reasoning graph paths. Leveraging these synthetic reflection data, we propose DARS, a Dual-model Reflective Scoring framework featuring a dedicated Critic model trained for effective reflection. DARS achieves strong performance and consistently outperforms existing ASAS baselines across all evaluation metrics. Extensive experiments further provide novel insights into the value of reflection data, framework design, and the scaling behavior of DARS. We release the DARS code at https://github.com/lijiazheng99/DARS.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_19230
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Two Heads Are Better Than One: Dual-Model Verbal Reflection at Inference-Time
Li, Jiazheng
Zhou, Yuxiang
Lu, Junru
Tyen, Gladys
Gui, Lin
Aloisi, Cesare
He, Yulan
Computation and Language
Although preference optimization methods have improved reasoning performance in Large Language Models (LLMs), they often lack transparency regarding why one reasoning outcome is preferred over another. This limitation is especially critical in Automated Student Answer Scoring (ASAS), where explainability is essential to justify assessment outcomes. Verbal reinforcement learning offers the potential to generate explicit reflection, but it tends to produce superficial critiques that can harm assessment performance. Existing LLMs also struggle to reliably detect subtle reasoning errors in ASAS tasks. Moreover, manually identifying intermediate reasoning errors is expensive and difficult to scale. To address these challenges, we introduce a contrastive reflection synthesis pipeline that generates precise verbal feedback by identifying discrepancies in structure reasoning graph paths. Leveraging these synthetic reflection data, we propose DARS, a Dual-model Reflective Scoring framework featuring a dedicated Critic model trained for effective reflection. DARS achieves strong performance and consistently outperforms existing ASAS baselines across all evaluation metrics. Extensive experiments further provide novel insights into the value of reflection data, framework design, and the scaling behavior of DARS. We release the DARS code at https://github.com/lijiazheng99/DARS.
title Two Heads Are Better Than One: Dual-Model Verbal Reflection at Inference-Time
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.19230