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Main Authors: Lee, Byung-Kwan, Chee, Youngchae, Ro, Yong Man
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02099
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author Lee, Byung-Kwan
Chee, Youngchae
Ro, Yong Man
author_facet Lee, Byung-Kwan
Chee, Youngchae
Ro, Yong Man
contents Think-Answer reasoners such as DeepSeek-R1 have made notable progress by leveraging interpretable internal reasoning. However, despite the frequent presence of self-reflective cues like "Oops!", they remain vulnerable to output errors during single-pass inference. To address this limitation, we propose an efficient Recursive Think-Answer Process (R-TAP) that enables models to engage in iterative reasoning cycles and generate more accurate answers, going beyond conventional single-pass approaches. Central to this approach is a confidence generator that evaluates the certainty of model responses and guides subsequent improvements. By incorporating two complementary rewards-Recursively Confidence Increase Reward and Final Answer Confidence Reward-we show that R-TAP-enhanced models consistently outperform conventional single-pass methods for both large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). Moreover, by analyzing the frequency of "Oops"-like expressions in model responses, we find that R-TAP-applied models exhibit significantly fewer self-reflective patterns, resulting in more stable and faster inference-time reasoning. We hope R-TAP pave the way evolving into efficient and elaborated methods to refine the reasoning processes of future AI.
format Preprint
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institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Recursive Think-Answer Process for LLMs and VLMs
Lee, Byung-Kwan
Chee, Youngchae
Ro, Yong Man
Computation and Language
Think-Answer reasoners such as DeepSeek-R1 have made notable progress by leveraging interpretable internal reasoning. However, despite the frequent presence of self-reflective cues like "Oops!", they remain vulnerable to output errors during single-pass inference. To address this limitation, we propose an efficient Recursive Think-Answer Process (R-TAP) that enables models to engage in iterative reasoning cycles and generate more accurate answers, going beyond conventional single-pass approaches. Central to this approach is a confidence generator that evaluates the certainty of model responses and guides subsequent improvements. By incorporating two complementary rewards-Recursively Confidence Increase Reward and Final Answer Confidence Reward-we show that R-TAP-enhanced models consistently outperform conventional single-pass methods for both large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). Moreover, by analyzing the frequency of "Oops"-like expressions in model responses, we find that R-TAP-applied models exhibit significantly fewer self-reflective patterns, resulting in more stable and faster inference-time reasoning. We hope R-TAP pave the way evolving into efficient and elaborated methods to refine the reasoning processes of future AI.
title Recursive Think-Answer Process for LLMs and VLMs
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.02099