Post-Training Large Language Models via Reinforcement Learning from Self-Feedback
Published in ArXiv, 2026
Large Language Models (LLMs) often produce plausible but poorly-calibrated answers, limiting their reliability on reasoning-intensive tasks. Recent research suggests that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning paths are inherent in pre-trained LLMs and can be elicited by simply altering the decoding process, where the presence of a CoT path correlates with higher answer confidence.
Building on these insights, we present Reinforcement Learning from Self-Feedback (RLSF), a post-training stage that utilises the model’s intrinsic confidence as a self-generated reward. By generating multiple CoT decoding beams from a frozen LLM, we compute the confidence of each final answer span and rank the resulting traces accordingly to create synthetic preferences. These preferences are subsequently utilised to fine-tune the policy through standard preference optimisation, requiring no human labels, gold answers, or externally curated rewards.
RLSF simultaneously (i) refines the model’s probability estimates–restoring well-behaved calibration–and (ii) strengthens step-by-step reasoning, yielding improved performance on arithmetic reasoning and multiple-choice question answering. By converting a model’s own uncertainty into structured self-feedback, RLSF affirms reinforcement learning on intrinsic model behaviour as a principled and data-efficient component of the LLM post-training pipeline. Our results demonstrate that leveraging these inherent reasoning capabilities provides a robust path for enhancing model reliability without manual prompt engineering or external supervision.