Share your thoughts, 1 month free Claude Pro on usSee more
WorkDL logo mark

Self-Awareness before Action: Mitigating Logical Inertia via Proactive Cognitive Awareness

About

Large language models perform well on many reasoning tasks, yet they often lack awareness of whether their current knowledge or reasoning state is complete. In non-interactive puzzle settings, the narrative is fixed and the underlying structure is hidden; once a model forms an early hypothesis under incomplete premises, it can propagate that error throughout the reasoning process, leading to unstable conclusions. To address this issue, we propose SABA, a reasoning framework that explicitly introduces self-awareness of missing premises before making the final decision. SABA formulates reasoning as a recursive process that alternates between structured state construction and obstacle resolution: it first applies Information Fusion to consolidate the narrative into a verifiable base state, and then uses Query-driven Structured Reasoning to identify and resolve missing or underspecified premises by turning them into queries and progressively completing the reasoning state through hypothesis construction and state refinement. Across multiple evaluation metrics, SABA achieves the best performance on all three difficulty splits of the non-interactive Detective Puzzle benchmark, and it also maintains leading results on multiple public benchmarks.

Fulong Fan, Peilin Liu, Fengzhe Liu, Shuyan Yang, Gang Yan• 2026

Related benchmarks

TaskDatasetResultRank
General ReasoningBBH
Accuracy93.2
190
Question AnsweringStrategyQA
Accuracy87.4
123
General ReasoningBIG-Bench Hard--
68
Detective Puzzle ReasoningDP Easy
SA Score85.7
18
Detective Puzzle ReasoningDP Medium
SA83.2
18
Detective Puzzle ReasoningDP Complex
SA79.3
18
Strategy-based Question AnsweringStrategyQA--
16
Multi-hop Question AnsweringHotpotQA
Answer Accuracy (Ans)78.6
9
Showing 8 of 8 rows

Other info

Follow for update