Multi-Criteria Evaluation of Hierarchical Reasoning, Self-Correction, and Factual Consistency in Large Language Models across Complex Language Tasks
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.66857/jirt.v3i2.51Keywords:
Large Language Models, Hierarchical Reasoning, Self-Correction, Factual Consistency, Multi-Criteria EvaluationAbstract
The rapid proliferation of large language models has necessitated the development of robust evaluation frameworks that extend beyond simple accuracy metrics. This paper introduces a comprehensive multi-criteria evaluation methodology designed to assess the capabilities of these advanced computational architectures in handling complex language tasks. Specifically, the study focuses on three foundational dimensions: hierarchical reasoning, self-correction mechanisms, and factual consistency. By systematically isolating these dimensions, the research provides a nuanced understanding of how models parse intricate problem structures, dynamically revise their internal states upon detecting errors, and maintain fidelity to established external knowledge bases. The proposed framework employs novel mathematical formulations to quantify these qualitative traits, enabling a rigorous, quantitative benchmarking process. Through extensive empirical analysis across diverse datasets, the findings reveal critical trade-offs between a model's ability to engage in deep hierarchical reasoning and its capacity to remain factually grounded. Furthermore, the evaluation of self-correction capabilities highlights persistent vulnerabilities in unsupervised revision protocols. This study contributes to the broader discourse on artificial intelligence reliability and safety by offering a structured approach to diagnosing model deficiencies, ultimately guiding the design of more resilient and dependable language processing systems
References
1. Liu, Y., Ott, M., Goyal, N., Du, J., Joshi, M., Chen, D., Levy, O., Lewis, M., Zettlemoyer, L., & Stoyanov, V. (2019). RoBERTa: A robustly optimized BERT pretraining approach. arXiv preprint arXiv:1907.11692.
2. Sang, Y. (2025, July). Towards explainable rag: Interpreting the influence of retrieved passages on generation. In 2025 4th International Conference on Robotics, Artificial Intelligence and Intelligent Control (RAIIC) (pp. 397-400). IEEE.
3. Han, C., Ma, Y., Tan, J., Zheng, W., & Tang, X. (2026, March). Beyond detection: Exploring evidence-based multi-agent debate for misinformation intervention and persuasion. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 40, No. 45, pp. 38542-38550).
4. Zhu, R., Ma, Z., Wu, J., Gao, J., Wang, J., Lin, D., & He, C. (2025, April). Utilize the flow before stepping into the same river twice: Certainty represented knowledge flow for refusal-aware instruction tuning. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 39, No. 24, pp. 26157-26165).
5. Wang, H., Xu, Q., Liu, C., Wu, J., Lin, F., & Chen, W. (2026, April). Emergent hierarchical reasoning in llms through reinforcement learning. In International Conference on Learning Representations (Vol. 2026, pp. 74519-74543).
6. Sutskever, I., Vinyals, O., & Le, Q. V. (2014). Sequence to sequence learning with neural networks. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems.
7. Li, X., Wang, P., Li, G., Ni, L., & Zhang, Y. (2023). Design of interface circuits and lightweight PUF for TMR sensors. IEEE Sensors Journal, 23(11), 11754-11761.
8. Zhang, W., & Pei, S. (2026). Predictive prefetching for retrieval-augmented generation. Proceedings of Machine Learning Research. The Forty-third International Conference on Machine Learning, ICML 2026. https://par.nsf.gov/biblio/10686293
9. Xie, Z., Liao, R., Wang, Z., Chen, C., Hua, X. S., & Luo, X. (2026, July). GALA: Geometric Data Selection with Strategic Prospecting for Large Language Model Self-training. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026(pp. 10281-10293).
10. Xu, X., Han, C., Zhang, Y., Tu, W., & Yang, Y. (2024, April). Curricular contrastive regularization for speech enhancement with self-supervised representations. In ICASSP 2024-2024 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) (pp. 10486-10490). IEEE.
11. Li, Y., Bai, X., Liu, S., & Zhang, L. (2026). RepBench: Compiling benchmarks into capability representations for large language models. arXiv. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28008
12. Yu, H., Zhang, J., Chen, C., Xiang, T., Fang, Y., Niebles, J. C., & Adeli, E. (2026, March). Socialgen: Modeling multi-human social interaction with language models. In 2026 International Conference on 3D Vision (3DV) (pp. 1-17). IEEE.
13. Xu, X., Xie, H., Qin, S. J., Li, L., Tao, X., & Wang, F. L. (2026). Delayed commitment for representation readiness in stage-wise audio-visual learning.arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.01673.
14. Tang, J., Wang, Z., Gong, Z., Yu, J., Zhu, X., & Yin, J. (2025, April). Multi-grained query-guided set prediction network for grounded multimodal named entity recognition. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 39, No. 24, pp. 25246-25254).
15. Yao, Y., Xiao, W., Miao, P., Chen, G., Yang, H., Chae, C. B., & Wong, K. K. (2025). UAV-relay-aided secure maritime networks coexisting with satellite networks: robust beamforming and trajectory optimization. IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications.
16. Zhu, R., Jiang, X., Wu, J., Ma, Z., Song, J., Bai, F., ... & He, C. (2025, April). GRAIT: gradient-driven refusal-aware instruction tuning for effective hallucination mitigation. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2025 (pp. 4006-4021).
17. Tang, J., Yang, Y., Yu, J., Wang, Z. X., Liang, H., Yao, L., & Yin, J. (2025, November). Unco: Uncertainty-driven collaborative framework of large and small models for grounded multimodal ner. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (pp. 7644-7662).
18. Zhang, Y., Zhang, Y., Zhao, M., Feng, S., & Cheung, Y. M. (2026). How to Ask the AI: A User Perspective Survey for Large Language Model Prompting.IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence.
19. Yao, Y., Zhang, J., Miao, P., Zhang, L., Chen, G., Shu, F., & Wong, K. K. (2025). Hybrid RIS-enhanced ISAC secure systems: Joint optimization in the presence of an extended target. IEEE Transactions on Communications.
20. Tang, J., Yuan, X., Liu, J., Yu, J., Dong, X., Chen, L., ... & Yin, J. (2026). SAKE: Self-aware Knowledge Exploitation-Exploration for Grounded Multimodal Named Entity Recognition. arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.20146.
21. Sang, Y. (2025, October). AutoCrit: A Meta-Reasoning Framework for Self-Critique and Iterative Error Correction in LLM Chains-of-Thought. In 2025 6th International Conference on Machine Learning and Computer Application (ICMLCA) (pp. 1177-1180). IEEE.
22. Li, K., Shuang, K., & Guo, J. (2026). Bring order to the jumbled input: Layered attention for Large Language Model based Event Argument Extraction. Engineering Applications of Artificial Intelligence, 165, 113399.
23. Xu, X., Tu, W., Yang, Y., Li, J., Zhang, Y., & Chen, H. (2026). Contribution-aware dynamic multi-modal balance for audio-visual speech separation.IEEE Transactions on Multimedia.
24. Beltagy, I., Peters, M. E., & Cohan, A. (2020). Longformer: The long-document transformer. arXiv preprint arXiv:2004.05150.
25. Mikolov, T., Chen, K., Corrado, G. S., & Dean, J. (2013). Efficient estimation of word representations in vector space. arXiv preprint arXiv:1301.3781.
26. Liu, H., Ding, L., & Henao, R. (2026, July). Learning to Control Summaries with Score Ranking. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026(pp. 35336-35359).
27. Guo, J., Shuang, K., Li, J., Wang, Z., & Liu, Y. (2022, May). Beyond the granularity: Multi-perspective dialogue collaborative selection for dialogue state tracking. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) (pp. 2320-2332).
28. Shuang, K., Zhou, J., Wang, Q., Qian, B., Wei, Y., & Guo, J. (2025). Utilizing contextual summarizing and reasoning for enhancing document-level event argument extraction. Expert Systems with Applications, 287, 128075.
29. Sang, Y. (2025, August). Robustness of fine-tuned llms under noisy retrieval inputs. In 2025 6th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Electromechanical Automation (AIEA) (pp. 417-420). IEEE.
30. Xiao, Q., & Zhou, K. (2026). MACD: Model-Aware Contrastive Decoding via Counterfactual Data. arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.01740.
31. Wei, W. D., Fang, H. B., Liu, Y. D., Shi, J. X., Kwok, J., & Li, Y. F. (2026). Activation Compression in LLMs: Theoretical Analysis and Efficient Algorithm. arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.01255.
32. Yang Y, Yang X, Jiang Y, et al. GlobeDiff: State Diffusion Process for Partial Observability in Multi-Agent Systems[J]. arXiv preprint arXiv:2602.15776, 2026.
33. Pei, Z., Huang, Q., & Wang, S. (2026). When LLMs develop languages: Symbolic communication for efficient multi-agent reasoning.arXiv preprint arXiv:2606.29354.
34. Li, Y., Yang, Z., Huang, Y., Liu, X., & Qi, G. (2026, March). C³TG: Conflict-aware, Composite, and Collaborative Controlled Text Generation. In Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (Vol. 40, No. 38, pp. 31834-31842).
35. Xu, X., Wang, Y., Xu, D., Peng, Y., Zhang, C., Jia, J., & Chen, B. (2022, May). Vsegan: Visual speech enhancement generative adversarial network. In ICASSP 2022-2022 IEEE International Conference on Acoustics, Speech and Signal Processing (ICASSP) (pp. 7308-7311). IEEE.
36. Wang, X., Suzuki, Y., Li, C. M., & Tanaka, S. (2025, June). Micropatterned PDMS damping layer integration to enhance the fidelity of piezoelectric MEMS speakers without SPL penalty. In 2025 23rd International Conference on Solid-State Sensors, Actuators and Microsystems (Transducers) (pp. 455-458). IEEE.
Downloads
Published
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2026 Stephanie Yam

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.