Self-Reference in Large Language Models: The Introspection Threshold for Recursive Self-Improvement

arXiv:2607.04277 · physics.soc-ph, cs.AI · Submitted 2026-07-05 · Read on arXiv

physics.soc-ph, cs.AI

Submitted: 2026-07-05

Updated: 2026-09-18

Comments: 21 pages, 4 figures, 1 table

License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/

Terminology

• Introspection — 77× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Core — 17× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Transformer — 16× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Alignment — 12× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Verification — 8× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Hallucination — 6× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Metacognition — 5× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Large Language Models (LLMs) — 4× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Transformer Architecture — 4× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Benchmark — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Calibration — 3× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Fidelity — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Grounding — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Reinforcement Learning — 3× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Scaffolding — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Structural Constraints — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Abstraction — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Accuracy — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Fine-Tuning — 2× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Foundation Model — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Foundation Models — 2× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Provenance — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Self-Evolving Agents — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Steering — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• AI Agents — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• AI Alignment — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Activation Steering — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Adam — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Adaptability — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Adaptation — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Agentic Reasoning — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Axioms — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Computational Tractability — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Decode — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Formal Verification — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generative Model — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Generative Models — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Human-in-the-Loop — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• In-Context Learning — 1× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Iterative Refinement — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Large Language Model (LLM) — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• On the Situational Awareness Dataset — 1× in this paper
• Proceedings of the Conference on Language Modeling — 1× in this paper
• Reward Function — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes

Sources

• The Red Queen G\"odel Machine: Co-Evolving Agents and Their Evaluators
• Neural Network Quine

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