Stepwise Think-Critique: Interleaved Reasoning and Self-Critique in a Single LLM

Abstract

Human beings solve complex problems through critical thinking, where reasoning and evaluation are intertwined to converge toward correct solutions. However, most existing large language models (LLMs) treat the reasoning and verification as separate processes: they either generate reasoning without explicit self-checking or rely on external verifiers to detect errors post hoc. The former lacks immediate feedback, while the latter increases system complexity and hinders synchronized learning. Motivated by human critical thinking, we propose Stepwise Think-Critique (STC), an end-to-end trainable framework in which a single LLM emits a structured, step-level critique inline with each reasoning step. STC is trained with reinforcement learning that complements reasoning rewards with a critique-consistency reward derived from final-answer correctness, jointly optimizing reasoning correctness and critique reliability. On five mathematical reasoning benchmarks, STC improves Pass@1 by 7.2% over the 1.5B base model and attains 67.4% step-level critique F1, surpassing seven external process reward models evaluated at their per-dataset oracle thresholds---a step toward LLMs with built-in critical thinking.