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To have a deeper understanding of self-correction, we endeavor to decompose, evaluate, and analyze the self-correction behaviors of LLMs. By enumerating and analyzing answer correctness before and after self-correction, we decompose the self-correction capability into confidence (being confident to correct answers) and critique (turning wrong answers to correct) capabilities, and propose two metrics from a probabilistic perspective to measure these 2 capabilities, along with another metric for overall self-correction capability evaluation. Based on our decomposition and evaluation metrics, we conduct extensive experiments and draw some empirical conclusions. For example, we find different models can exhibit distinct behaviors: some models are confident while others are more critical. We also find the trade-off between the two capabilities (i.e. improving one can lead to a decline in the other) when manipulating model self-correction behavior by prompts or in-context learning. Further, we find a simple yet efficient strategy to improve self-correction capability by transforming Supervision Fine-Tuning (SFT) data format, and our strategy outperforms vanilla SFT in both capabilities and achieves much higher accuracy after self-correction. Our code will be publicly available on GitHub.","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.19513v1","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19513v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"confidence-v-s-critique-a-decomposition-of","repo_url":"https://github.com/Zhe-Young/SelfCorrectDecompose","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"in-context-learning","task_name":"In-Context Learning"}],"methods":[{"method_slug":"sft","method_name":"SFT"}],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":"https://syntology.ai/paper/2412.19513","atlas_url":"https://app.syntology.ai/?focus=2412.19513","mcp":{"get_harvested_code_for_paper":{"arxiv_id":"2412.19513"}},"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers","read_at":"2026-09-25T09:33:49+00:00","read_at_is":"when the build read Syntology's graph, not when any sample ran","claim":"Per-sample execution status on synthesized fixtures; not a correctness claim about the paper. 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