@inproceedings{zheng-etal-2025-critic,
    title = "Critic-{C}o{T}: Boosting the Reasoning Abilities of Large Language Model via Chain-of-Thought Critic",
    author = "Zheng, Xin  and
      Lou, Jie  and
      Cao, Boxi  and
      Wen, Xueru  and
      Ji, Yuqiu  and
      Lin, Hongyu  and
      Lu, Yaojie  and
      Han, Xianpei  and
      Zhang, Debing  and
      Sun, Le",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/display_plenaries/2025.findings-acl.89/",
    pages = "1768--1806",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-256-5",
    abstract = "Self-critic has become a crucial mechanism for enhancing the reasoning performance of LLMs. However, current approaches mainly involve basic prompts for intuitive instance-level feedback, which resembles System-1 processes and limits the reasoning capabilities. Moreover, there is a lack of in-depth investigations into the relationship between LLM{'}s ability to criticize and its task-solving performance. To address these issues, we propose Critic-CoT, a novel framework that pushes LLMs toward System-2-like critic capability. Through a step-wise CoT reasoning paradigm and the automatic construction of weak-supervision data without human annotation, Critic-CoT enables LLMs to engage in slow, analytic self-critique and refinement, thereby improving their reasoning abilities. Experiments on GSM8K and MATH and out-of-domain evaluation demonstrate that our enhanced model significantly boosts task-solving performance by filtering out invalid solutions or iterative refinement. Furthermore, we investigate the intrinsic correlation between critique and task-solving abilities within LLMs, discovering that these abilities can mutually reinforce each other rather than conflict."
}