Thinking About Thinking: SAGE-nano's Inverse Reasoning for Self-Aware Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Jha, Basab, Paudel, Firoj, Puri, Ujjwal, Yuting, Zhang, Donghyuk, Choi, Junhao, Wang
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866913919872794624
author Jha, Basab
Paudel, Firoj
Puri, Ujjwal
Yuting, Zhang
Donghyuk, Choi
Junhao, Wang
author_facet Jha, Basab
Paudel, Firoj
Puri, Ujjwal
Yuting, Zhang
Donghyuk, Choi
Junhao, Wang
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities at solving complex reasoning tasks with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, but their decision-making processes remain somewhat blackbox. We introduce textbfinverse reasoning, a novel paradigm enabling LLMs to decompose and explain their own reasoning chains post-hoc. Our approach, used in SAGE-nano, a 4-billion-parameter reasoning model, employs a metacognitive structure that reflects back via attention processes to identify major decision points and generate explanations of reasoning choices. While typical CoT approaches are directed towards forward reasoning generation, inverse reasoning provides insight into why specific reasoning chains were selected over others. Through thorough testing of logical reasoning puzzles, math problems and ethical dilemmas from AQUA-RAT, CommonsenseQA, and customized benchmarks, we demonstrate that SAGE-nano is at the cutting edge both on reasoning accuracy (74.6% on AQUA-RAT) and explanation quality (92.1% human preference score) for its task, and offers performance almost on par with models like Claude-3.5 Sonnet or GPT-4o. Our contributions are: (i) the first rigorous framework for LLM self-reflection via inverse reasoning, (ii) a novel metalearning framework to reverse the attention flow, (iii) comprehensive evaluation frameworks for reasoning transparency, and (iv) evidence that increasing reasoning using inverse reasoning improves interpretability along with reasoning performance. Our work creates new avenues for transparent AI systems and closes significant gaps in AI safety, education, and scientific discovery.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_00092
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Thinking About Thinking: SAGE-nano's Inverse Reasoning for Self-Aware Language Models
Jha, Basab
Paudel, Firoj
Puri, Ujjwal
Yuting, Zhang
Donghyuk, Choi
Junhao, Wang
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities at solving complex reasoning tasks with Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting, but their decision-making processes remain somewhat blackbox. We introduce textbfinverse reasoning, a novel paradigm enabling LLMs to decompose and explain their own reasoning chains post-hoc. Our approach, used in SAGE-nano, a 4-billion-parameter reasoning model, employs a metacognitive structure that reflects back via attention processes to identify major decision points and generate explanations of reasoning choices. While typical CoT approaches are directed towards forward reasoning generation, inverse reasoning provides insight into why specific reasoning chains were selected over others. Through thorough testing of logical reasoning puzzles, math problems and ethical dilemmas from AQUA-RAT, CommonsenseQA, and customized benchmarks, we demonstrate that SAGE-nano is at the cutting edge both on reasoning accuracy (74.6% on AQUA-RAT) and explanation quality (92.1% human preference score) for its task, and offers performance almost on par with models like Claude-3.5 Sonnet or GPT-4o. Our contributions are: (i) the first rigorous framework for LLM self-reflection via inverse reasoning, (ii) a novel metalearning framework to reverse the attention flow, (iii) comprehensive evaluation frameworks for reasoning transparency, and (iv) evidence that increasing reasoning using inverse reasoning improves interpretability along with reasoning performance. Our work creates new avenues for transparent AI systems and closes significant gaps in AI safety, education, and scientific discovery.
title Thinking About Thinking: SAGE-nano's Inverse Reasoning for Self-Aware Language Models
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.00092