Beyond Answer Voting: Fine-Grained Correction of LLM Reasoning through Graph Alignment across Sampled Traces

Abstract

Large language models increasingly tackle tasks that require multi-step reasoning, where errors in intermediate claims can affect the final answer. Self-consistency (SC) improves reasoning by voting over sampled final answers, but its vote leaves intermediate disagreements unresolved. To address this problem, we introduce DDRG (Disagreement-Driven Verification Guided by Reasoning Graphs), a framework for selective correction from a frozen bank of reasoning traces. Our insight is that graph alignment can expose claim-level disagreements and provide correction evidence without expanding the sampled trace bank. DDRG builds source-grounded claim graphs and sends localized conflicts to an answer-blind verifier. A verifier-supported refutation that reaches the majority answer's supporting path triggers one focused repair; otherwise, DDRG returns the exact SC vote. Experimental results across five benchmarks show that native zero-shot DDRG improves macro-average accuracy over direct answering by 8.65 and 15.83 percentage points for Qwen2.5-7B and Llama3.1-8B. It also exceeds CoT, the evaluated GoT and GoV question-answering adaptations, and SC on this macro metric. DDRG links local verification to selective correction without enlarging the initial candidate bank.