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

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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 \textbf{S}elf-\textbf{A}udited \textbf{Ve}rified \textbf{R}easoning (\textsc{SAVeR}), 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.

Wenhao Yuan, Chenchen Lin, Jian Chen, Jinfeng Xu, Xuehe Wang, Edith Cheuk Han Ngai• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
Multi-hop Question Answering2WikiMHQA
F1 Score55.8
73
Reading ComprehensionQuoref
F1 Score45.7
32
Fact VerificationFEVER
EM61.1
18
Question AnsweringNatural Questions (NQ)
Exact Match (EM)37.1
18
Multi-hop QA2WikiMHQA
Average Violation0.56
4
Multi-hop QAMuSiQue
Avg Violation0.83
4
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