BARREL: Boundary-Aware Reasoning for Factual and Reliable LRMs

Understand

Recent advances in Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have shown impressive capabilities in mathematical and logical reasoning.

• However, current LRMs rarely admit ignorance or respond with "I don't know".
• Instead, they often produce incorrect answers while showing undue confidence, raising concerns about their factual reliability.
• In this work, we identify two pathological reasoning patterns characterized by overthinking that contribute to the overconfident and incorrect answers: last-minute guessing and second-thought spiraling.