Avi Caciularu
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Reinforcement Learning with Metacognitive Feedback Elicits Faithful Uncertainty Expression in LLMs
Metacognition is a critical component of intelligence that describes the ability to monitor and regulate one's own cognitive processes. Yet LLMs exhibit systemic deficiencies in key metacognitive faculties: they hallucinate with high confidence, fail to recognize knowledge boundaries, and misrepresent their internal uncertainty--undermining trustworthiness and reliability. Since monitoring task performance and adapting behavior accordingly are central to metacognition, we posit that models capable of accurately judging their own performance are better positioned to improve it. We operationalize this idea via two novel mechanisms: reinforcement learning with metacognitive feedback (RLMF), a paradigm to refine completion rankings during preference optimization based on the quality of a model's self-judgments of performance, and metacognitive data selection, which uses similar self-judgments to identify high-value training examples, outperforming naive active learning. We apply these innovations to the problem of faithful calibration (FC), a task that is itself fundamentally metacognitive: the goal is to align expressed with intrinsic uncertainty, difficult even for frontier LLMs. We adopt a two-stage, decoupled approach, first using these methods to calibrate the faithfulness of models' self-reported confidence scores, then mapping to natural, context-adaptable linguistic uncertainty via targeted output editing. Extensive experiments show RLMF achieves generalizable, state-of-the-art FC on diverse tasks while preserving accuracy. Further, RLMF surpasses standard RL by up to 63% while enhancing models' ability to assess and express their own capability limits. This positions RLMF as a promising paradigm to enhance LLM metacognition toward improved abilities and alignment, and suggests metacognitive performance as an effective RL signal to overcome limits of prior intrinsic feedback methods.
Real-Time Execution with Autoregressive Policies
Real-time execution, enabled by asynchronous inference that ensures both smooth action trajectories and fast reactivity, is critical for realistic deployments of large-scale Vision-Language-Action models. However, recent work on real-time execution primarily focuses on variants of diffusion policies, even though it is more critical for autoregressive policies given their slower rollout speed in synchronous inference. In contrast, we demonstrate that autoregressive policies can achieve real-time execution by adjusting the tokenization horizon and applying constrained decoding, thereby guaranteeing strict latency bounds that enable multi-trajectory decoding to maximize performance. Across simulated and real-world environments, we find that the autoregressive policy consistently outperforms its equivalent-level flow-matching policy counterpart while achieving significantly improved task completion speeds from synchronous inference. Coupled with the inherent advantages of autoregressive policies, such as faster convergence and better generalizability in instruction-following, these results confirm that autoregressive policies can remain a competitive policy type supporting real-time execution.
Latent Reasoning with Supervised Thinking States
Reasoning with a chain-of-thought (CoT) enables Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex tasks but incurs significant inference costs due to the generation of long rationales. We propose Thinking States, a method that performs reasoning {\em while} the input is processing. Specifically, Thinking States generates sequences of thinking tokens every few input tokens, transforms the thoughts back into embedding space, and adds them to the following input tokens. This has two key advantages. First, it captures the recurrent nature of CoT, but where the thought tokens are generated as input is processing. Second, since the thoughts are represented as tokens, they can be learned from natural language supervision, and using teacher-forcing, which is parallelizable. Empirically, Thinking States outperforms other latent reasoning methods on multiple reasoning tasks, narrowing the gap to CoT on math problems, and matching its performance on 2-Hop QA with improved latency. On state-tracking tasks, we show Thinking States leads to stronger reasoning behavior than CoT, successfully extrapolating to longer sequences than seen during training.