Confidence-Orchestrated Self-Evolution against Uncertain LLM Feedback
The paper proposes COSE, a method that uses an LLM's intrinsic confidence as an uncertainty signal to improve self-evolutionary training, achieving state-of-the-art performance on general reasoning and mathematics.
Abstract
More Like ThisSelf-evolving large language models (LLMs) learn by generating their own training tasks and solutions, reducing reliance on human-curated supervision. However, in many reasoning domains, the model must also validate generated tasks and judge generated answers to obtain training signals. This creates a training-signal challenge: erroneous self-judgments become erroneous gradient updates. Existing approaches either rely on external verifiers, which limits generality, or treat noisy self-generated feedback as supervision. We propose COSE (Confidence-Orchestrated Self-Evolution), which uses the LLM's intrinsic confidence as a lightweight uncertainty signal to modulate learning. COSE introduces confidence-weighted PPO updates and confidence-prioritized replay. Across 19 held-out benchmarks and four Qwen/Llama backbones (0.6B--4B), COSE consistently improves over base models and achieves the best average performance in general reasoning and mathematics, while remaining competitive on code. Code and data are available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/COSE_-B5C2.