VeriEvol: Verified data construction pipeline for scaling multimodal mathematical reasoning
VeriEvol is a new framework for scaling reinforcement learning on visual mathematical reasoning by decoupling prompt difficulty expansion from answer reliability verification. It uses a type-aware evolution module to generate harder image-grounded prompts and an HTV-Agent verifier that rejects answers only after failing to find counter-evidence. Scaling SFT data from 10K to 250K samples raises mean accuracy from 35.42 to 54.73 across five visual-math benchmarks, with an additional +3.88 cumulative gain over an un-evolved RL baseline when combined with GRPO-style training. The authors release prompts, data, models, code, and full verifier traces.
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Self-Trained Verification (STV) Unlocks Training- and Test-Time Self-Improvement for Reasoning Models
This paper introduces Self-Trained Verification (STV), a method that trains a verifier to imitate a more informed version of itself by leveraging reference solutions as supervision signal, addressing the core bottleneck in both test-time verification-refinement loops and self-training pipelines. At test time, STV roughly doubles accuracy on hard math and achieves a 14x lift on scientific reasoning tasks. At training time, the authors combine STV with RL in a procedure called Verifier-in-the-Loop (ViL) training, yielding a 33% further gain in pass@1 over an already RL-converged generator, with standalone pass@1 climbing 30% relative past standard RL convergence. The work argues that verification quality, not generation, is the primary bottleneck for scaling reasoning on hard problems.
ExpRL: RL-based mid-training using human QA data as reward scaffolds for LLM reasoning
ExpRL proposes an automated approach to LLM mid-training that replaces manually curated reasoning traces with large corpora of human-written QA data used as reward scaffolds rather than imitation targets. Reference solutions are hidden from the policy and used only to construct problem-specific grading rubrics, enabling dense process-level rewards that reinforce partial progress and intermediate reasoning steps. On challenging math reasoning benchmarks, ExpRL outperforms SFT, sparse-reward GRPO, and self-distillation as an RL initialization strategy, with additional mixed-domain experiments suggesting broader applicability.
EEVEE: Multi-dataset test-time prompt learning framework for self-improving LLM agents
EEVEE is a new framework enabling LLM agents to perform test-time prompt learning across heterogeneous multi-dataset task streams, addressing a gap where prior methods only handled single-dataset settings. The system uses a router to partition inputs into task clusters and assigns them to suitable prompt configurations, optimized via a router-prompt co-evolution strategy. Experiments show improvements of 10.38 and 24.32 average points over Qwen3-4B-Instruct and DeepSeek-V3.2 respectively, outperforming prior SOTA methods GEPA and ACE by up to 48.2%.
Equilibrium Reasoners: Learning Attractors Enables Scalable Reasoning
This paper introduces Equilibrium Reasoners (EqR), a framework that formalizes test-time compute scaling through learned task-conditioned attractors in latent space, where stable fixed points correspond to valid solutions. EqR scales along two axes—depth (more iterations) and breadth (aggregating stochastic trajectories)—without requiring external verifiers or task-specific priors. On Sudoku-Extreme, unrolling up to 40,000 equivalent layers boosts accuracy from 2.6% (feedforward baseline) to over 99%. The work provides a mechanistic lens for understanding why iterative latent models generalize beyond memorized patterns.
VERITAS: Visual verification enables inference-time steering and autonomous improvement for robot policies
Researchers introduce VERITAS, a generator-verifier framework pairing a pre-trained generalist robot policy with a gradient-free visual verifier to steer actions at inference time without additional training. Verified rollouts are also used for offline self-improvement via fine-tuning, achieving performance gains comparable to expert demonstrations but without human intervention. The work demonstrates that inference-time verification is a scalable mechanism for autonomous policy improvement during deployment.
VeriTrace: Cognitive-Graph Framework with Explicit Regulatory Loops for Deep Research Agents
VeriTrace introduces a cognitive-graph framework for deep research agents that replaces implicit LLM reasoning over intermediate representations with three explicit regulatory loops: interpretive update, deviation feedback, and schema revision. The system addresses contamination and error propagation in evolving mental models during complex multi-step research tasks. Using Qwen3.5-27B backbones, VeriTrace improves over the strongest matched baseline by 4.22 pp on DeepResearch Bench Insight and 5.9 pp Overall win rate on DeepConsult. With Config-DeepSeek, it achieves the strongest reproducible open-source result on DeepResearch Bench.
VEPO: Vision-anchored token selection improves RL for visual reasoning
A new arXiv paper identifies a failure mode of entropy-based credit assignment in multimodal reinforcement learning: vision-sensitive tokens with naturally low entropy are systematically ignored, causing the mechanism to collapse in visual reasoning tasks. The authors propose VEPO (Vision-Entropy token-selection for Policy Optimization), which couples visual sensitivity with token entropy via a multiplicative scheme to redirect gradient credit toward tokens that are both visually grounded and semantically informative. VEPO outperforms entropy-only baselines by 2.28 points at 7B scale and 3.15 points at 3B scale on visual reasoning benchmarks.
Self-improving VLMs can silently regress when verifier quality is task-mismatched
A new arXiv paper demonstrates that verifier-driven self-DPO, a common recipe for self-improving visual-language models, can silently degrade student model performance when the verifier's task-rubric accuracy is insufficient for the target task. Experiments on Qwen-3-VL-2B and Qwen-2.5-VL-3B across MathVista, MMMU, and BLINK show regressions of 3.4–10.9 percentage points below frozen baselines, with the counterintuitive finding that more accurate-but-still-wrong verifiers cause larger regressions than near-random ones. The authors provide a mechanistic explanation via a variance theorem for progress-gated replay and offer operational guidance: measure target-task rubric accuracy before running any verifier-driven loop and rank verifiers by task-specific quality rather than parameter count.