English

SAFE: Stepwise Atomic Feedback for Error correction in Multi-hop Reasoning

Computation and Language 2026-04-03 v1 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Multi-hop QA benchmarks frequently reward Large Language Models (LLMs) for spurious correctness, masking ungrounded or flawed reasoning steps. To shift toward rigorous reasoning, we propose SAFE, a dynamic benchmarking framework that replaces the ungrounded Chain-of-Thought (CoT) with a strictly verifiable sequence of grounded entities. Our framework operates across two phases: (1) train-time verification, where we establish an atomic error taxonomy and a Knowledge Graph (KG)-grounded verification pipeline to eliminate noisy supervision in standard benchmarks, identifying up to 14% of instances as unanswerable, and (2) inference-time verification, where a feedback model trained on this verified dataset dynamically detects ungrounded steps in real-time. Experimental results demonstrate that SAFE not only exposes the critical flaws of existing benchmarks at train-time, but also significantly outperforms standard baselines, achieving an average accuracy gain of 8.4 pp while guaranteeing verifiable trajectories at inference-time.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2604.01993,
  title  = {SAFE: Stepwise Atomic Feedback for Error correction in Multi-hop Reasoning},
  author = {Daeyong Kwon and Soyoung Yoon and Seung-won Hwang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.01993},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:50:55.893Z