Rowan Wang
Author directory2026
Evaluating and Improving LLM Self-Modeling
Siqi Zeng | Andre N. Assis | Rowan Wang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Siqi Zeng | Andre N. Assis | Rowan Wang
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
We study self-modeling: an LLM’s ability to answer questions about its own behavior. We focus on verifiable behavioral questions, such as whether a prompt edit would change the model’s final answer. To measure this capability, we introduce a benchmark that tests diverse types of self-modeling questions. Current models show non-trivial but limited self-modeling skill, and make systematic mistakes on simple counterfactual questions about their own behavior. To improve self-modeling skill, we develop a scalable synthetic-data pipeline that produces self-modeling training data, and show that reinforcement-learning can improve aggregate self-modeling skill across three open-source model families with some transfer to held-out tasks. These gains, however, do not seem to constitute introspection consistently: improved self-modeling may not arise from privileged access to the model’s internal decision process. We release our evaluation and training code on GitHub.