Self-Taught Self-Correction for Small Language Models

Viktor Moskvoretskii, Chris Biemann, Irina Nikishina

Self-Taught Self-Correction for Small Language Models: 16 upvotes on Hugging Face Daily Papers, #9 of 22 papers on 2025-03-13. Day-by-day upvote history.

Although large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance across various tasks, they remain prone to errors. A key challenge is enabling them to self-correct. While prior research has relied on external tools or large proprietary models, this work explores self-correction in small language models (SLMs) through iterative fine-tuning using solely self-generated data. We introduce the Self-Taught Self-Correction (STaSC) algorithm, which incorporates multiple algorithmic design choices. Experimental results on a question-answering task demonstrate that STaSC effectively learns self-correction, leading to significant performance improvements. Our analysis further provides insights into the mechanisms of self-correction and the impact of different design choices on learning dynamics and overall performance. To support future research, we release our user-friendly codebase and lightweight models.

Paper page on Hugging Face · arXiv

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