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COMPEL Glossary / reflection

Reflection

An agentic prompt pattern where the model critiques and revises its own output — typically after tool-call feedback or detected error — before returning a final answer.

What this means in practice

Improves correctness on tasks with a verifiable success signal; concerns include increased latency and the risk that reflection reinforces rather than corrects errors.

Synonyms

self-reflection , Reflexion , self-critique prompting

See also

  • ReAct — An agentic prompt pattern interleaving reasoning steps (Thought) and action steps (Act — typically a tool call) over multiple turns, with observations from each action feeding the next reasoning step.
  • Self-consistency — A meta-prompting technique that samples multiple independent reasoning paths (via temperature > 0) and selects the most frequent final answer — improving accuracy on multi-step reasoning tasks at the cost of proportional compute.
  • Tool use / function calling — A prompt pattern authorizing the model to request named functions with structured arguments — searching the web, reading a database, calling a calculator, triggering an API — rather than generating all answers from its weights.

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