Paper Detail

Beyond Meta-Reasoning: Metacognitive Consolidation for Self-Improving LLM Reasoning

Ziqing Zhuang, Linhai Zhang, Jiasheng Si, Deyu Zhou, Yulan He

arxiv Score 12.3

Published 2026-04-19 · First seen 2026-04-21

Research Track A · General AI

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities, and as existing approaches for enhancing LLM reasoning continue to mature, increasing attention has shifted toward meta-reasoning as a promising direction for further improvement. However, most existing meta-reasoning methods remain episodic: they focus on executing complex meta-reasoning routines within individual instances, but ignore the accumulation of reusable meta-reasoning skills across instances, leading to recurring failure modes and repeatedly high metacognitive effort. In this paper, we introduce Metacognitive Consolidation, a novel framework in which a model consolidates metacognitive experience from past reasoning episodes into reusable knowledge that improves future meta-reasoning. We instantiate this framework by structuring instance-level problem solving into distinct roles for reasoning, monitoring, and control to generate rich, attributable meta-level traces. These traces are then consolidated through a hierarchical, multi-timescale update mechanism that gradually forms evolving meta-knowledge. Experimental results demonstrate consistent performance gains across benchmarks and backbone models, and show that performance improves as metacognitive experience accumulates over time.

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BibTeX

@article{zhuang2026beyond,
  title = {Beyond Meta-Reasoning: Metacognitive Consolidation for Self-Improving LLM Reasoning},
  author = {Ziqing Zhuang and Linhai Zhang and Jiasheng Si and Deyu Zhou and Yulan He},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong reasoning capabilities, and as existing approaches for enhancing LLM reasoning continue to mature, increasing attention has shifted toward meta-reasoning as a promising direction for further improvement. However, most existing meta-reasoning methods remain episodic: they focus on executing complex meta-reasoning routines within individual instances, but ignore the accumulation of reusable meta-reasoning skills across instances, leading to rec},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.17399},
  keywords = {cs.AI},
  eprint = {2604.17399},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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