ReflectEvo: Improving Meta Introspection of Small LLMs by Learning Self-Reflection

We present a novel pipeline ReflectEvo to demonstrate that small language models (SLMs) can enhance meta introspection through reflection learning.This process iteratively generates self-reflection for self-training, fostering a continuous and self-evolving process.Leveraging this pipeline, we construct ReflectEvo-460k, a large scale, comprehensive self-generated reflection dataset with broadened instructions and diverse multi-domain tasks.Building upon this dataset, we demonstrate the effectiveness of reflection learning to improve SLMs' reasoning abilities using SFT and DPO with remarkable performance, substantially boosting Llama-3 from 52.4% to 71.2% and Mistral from 44.4% to 71.1%.It validates that ReflectEvo can rival or even surpass the reasoning capability of the three prominent open-sourced models on BIG-bench without distillation from superior models or finegrained human annotation.We further conduct a deeper analysis on the high quality of selfgenerated reflections and their impact on error localization and correction.Our work highlights the potential of continuously enhancing the reasoning performance of SLMs through iterative reflection learning in the long run.