ReCrit: Transition-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Scientific Critic Reasoning
Authors: Wanghan Xu, Yuhao Zhou, Hengyuan Zhao et al.
Summary
arXiv:2605. 18799v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can fail in critic interaction not only by answering incorrectly, but also by abandoning an initially correct scientific solution after user criticism.
Relevance
Read next because ReCrit: Transition-Aware Reinforcement Learning for Scientific Critic Reasoning overlaps with clean result "LoRA persona trained on alone emits at 23.5% when a co-trained partner learns ..., vs 0% control on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (MODERATE confidence)", clean result "Leakage rate is a usable signal for recovering trigger-shaped phrases on Gaperon-1125-1B without knowing the hidden trigger itself (MODERATE confidence)", clean result "Language-mismatch LoRA SFT on Qwen2.5-7B leaks the trained completion language into bystander directives the model was never trained on, absent under same-language SFT (LOW confidence)". Matching terms: code, rect, correct, stage, completion, language, model. Source: arxiv cs.LG (Machine Learning).
Threat model
Potential threat/caveat for clean result "LoRA persona trained on alone emits at 23.5% when a co-trained partner learns ..., vs 0% control on Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct (MODERATE confidence)": this item discusses robustness, benchmark.
Abstract
arXiv:2605.18799v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large language models can fail in critic interaction not only by answering incorrectly, but also by abandoning an initially correct scientific solution after user criticism. This is especially risky in scientific reasoning, where user criticism can turn a valid answer into an incorrect one. We frame critic interaction as an inter-turn correctness-transition problem rather than a final-answer accuracy problem, and identify three challenges: transition awareness, decoupling useful correction from harmful sycophancy, and scalable rollout. We propose ReCrit, a transition-aware reinforcement learning framework that decomposes Initial-to-Critic behavior into four quadrants: Correction, Sycophancy, Robustness, and Boundary. ReCrit rewards correction and robustness, penalizes sycophancy, and treats persistent errors as weak boundary signals. To make interaction training practical, ReCrit further uses dynamic asynchronous rollout with tail-adaptive completion to reduce rollout waiting. On three scientific reasoning benchmarks, ChemBench, TRQA, and EarthSE, ReCrit improves average Critic accuracy from 38.15 to 51.49 on Qwen3.5-4B and from 45.40 to 55.59 on Qwen3.5-9B. Ablations show that final-answer rewards provide little interaction-level gain, while transition-aware rewards and quadrant weighting produce more distinguishable training signals and larger net Critic-stage improvement. The code is available at https://github.com/black-yt/ReCrit .