Agentic Knowledgeable Self-awareness

Published
Source
arXiv
Paper number
058
Field
Agents / Self-Awareness
arXiv ID
2504.03553

Key points

  • Current LLM agents lack situational self-awareness, so they use cognitive resources such as reflection and external knowledge in a scattered and inefficient way.
  • Existing agent training methods are vulnerable to unexpected signals, prone to pattern collapse, and often incur high reasoning costs because they rely on a one-size-fits-all approach.
  • Agents also struggle to assess their own abilities dynamically in complex and changing environments, which leads to suboptimal decisions.
  • KnowSelf introduces a three-stage situational classification scheme, Fast, Slow, and Knowledgeable Thinking, to determine an agent's real-time cognitive resource needs.
  • It builds a lightweight offline knowledge system and generates self-awareness data by appending special tokens that indicate the type of thinking required for the trajectories the agent explored.
  • A two-stage fine-tuning process, SFT and RPO, teaches agents to connect situational cues with the right cognitive response, enabling them to activate reflection or external knowledge dynamically during inference.

Paper links

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