From Emergence to Control: Probing and Modulating Self-Reflection in Language Models

Self-reflection – the ability of a large language model (LLM) to revisit, evaluate, and revise its own reasoning – has recently emerged as a powerful behavior enabled by reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). While self-reflection correlates with improved reasoning accuracy, its origin and underlying mechanisms remain poorly understood. In this work, we first show that self-reflection is not exclusive to RLVR fine-tuned models: it already emerges, albeit rarely, in pretrained models. To probe this latent ability, we introduce Reflection-Inducing Probing, a method that injects reflection-triggering reasoning traces from fine-tuned models into pretrained models. This intervention raises self-reflection frequency of Qwen2.5 from 0.6% to 18.6%, revealing a hidden capacity for reflection. Moreover, our analysis of internal representations shows that both pretrained and fine-tuned models maintain hidden states that distinctly separate self-reflective from non-reflective contexts. Leveraging this observation, we then construct a self-reflection vector, a direction in activation space associated with self-reflective reasoning. By manipulating this vector, we enable bidirectional control over the self-reflective behavior for both pretrained and fine-tuned models. Experiments across multiple reasoning benchmarks show that enhancing these vectors improves reasoning performance by up to 12%, while suppressing them reduces computational cost, providing a flexible mechanism to navigate the trade-off between reasoning quality and efficiency without requiring additional training. Our findings further our understanding of self-reflection and support a growing body of work showing that understanding model internals can enable precise behavioral control.