Bridging the Know-Act Gap via Task-Level Autoregressive Reasoning

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 23 Mar 2026] Bridging the Know-Act Gap via Task-Level Autoregressive Reasoning Jihyun Janice Ahn, Ryo Kamoi, Berk Atil, Renze Lou, WonWoo Kang, Heehyun Park, Sarkar Snigdha Sarathi Das, Zhuoyang Zou, Xiaoxin Lu, Yusen Zhang, Asfahan Shah, Ridwanul Hasan Tanvir, Lingxiao Zhao, Hongxi Huang, Vignesh Venkatesh, Dianjun Lin, Hamid Shah, Wentao Wang, Zhanpeng Song, Joshua Reed Bassin, Dax Patel, Ishan Appareddy Agrahar, Sahil Pardasani, Xin Dong, Fatemeh Rahbari, Benjamin David Rishel, Soochan Andrew Lee, Yuv Boghani, Ali B. AlNaseeb, Pranav Suby, Seokhyeon Bae, Shreya Buddharaju, Damien Kula, Soumyadeep Das, Hanyang Frank Liu, Faye Mo, Wenpeng Yin LLMs often generate seemingly valid answers to flawed or ill-posed inputs. This is not due to missing knowledge: under discriminative prompting, the same models can mostly identify such issues, yet fail to reflect this in standard generative responses. This reveals a fundamental know-act gap between discriminative recognition and generative behavior. Prior work largely characterizes this issue in narrow settings, such as math word problems or question answering, with limited focus on how to integrate these two modes. In this work, we present a comprehensive analysis using FaultyScience, a newly constructed large-scale, cross-disciplinary benchmark of faulty scientific questions. We show that the gap is pervasive and stems from token-level autoregression, which entangles task selection (validate vs. answer) with content generation, preventing discriminative knowledge from being utilized. To address this, we propose DeIllusionLLM, a task-level autoregressive framework that explicitly models this decision. Through self-distillation, the model unifies discriminative judgment and generative reasoning within a single backbone. Empirically, DeIllusionLLM substantially reduces answer-despite-error failures under natural prompting while maintaining general reasoning performance, demonstrating that self-distillation is an effective and scalable solution for bridging the discriminative-generative know-act gap Comments: 12 pages Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2603.22619 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2603.22619v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2603.22619 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Jihyun Ahn [view email] [v1] Mon, 23 Mar 2026 22:43:34 UTC (253 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-03 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)