arXiv AI

Proof-Carrying Cognition: Closing the Verification Gap with Reality-Settled Reward

The paper introduces the concept of proof‑carrying cognition, aiming to close the verification gap in language‑model reasoning by using reality‑settled rewards. It presents a theoretical framework linking verifier‑gold correlation to compute‑capability trade‑offs, demonstrates that unsound verifiers degrade under best‑of‑N selection while sound verifiers improve, and proposes a new benchmark metric, Soundness‑under‑Pressure, for evaluating reality‑settled reasoning systems.

arXiv AI
Oct 5

Counterexample Generation via Per-Theorem Symbolic Verifiers: When Imitation Hurts and Reinforcement Repairs

The paper introduces SymCE, a dataset of 4,707 false undergraduate‑algebra and real‑analysis conjectures each paired with a deterministic Python verifier that can be executed to check truth. It studies counterexample generation by training a 4B‑parameter language model (Qwen3‑4B) first with supervised fine‑tuning and then with reinforcement learning (GRPO) using the verifier as a reward. The results show that counterexample‑only fine‑tuning can destroy true‑theorem recognition, while reinforcement learning with a sparse outcome‑only reward restores and surpasses baseline performance, achieving higher success rates than larger open‑weight models and competitive performance on other math benchmarks. "whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that reinforcement learning guided by a per‑theorem verifier can effectively repair the shortcomings of supervised fine‑tuning in theorem proving, offering a practical approach to improve language models’ mathematical reasoning capabilities."

By Omar Farouk Zouak, Houssam Eddine Boukhalfa, Soumaya Lakehal, Shiv Katiyar, Samia Nefti-Meziani
arXiv AI
Jul 14

LLMs as a Jury: Cross-Model Consensus Can Outperform Process Reward Models for LLM Reasoning

arXiv:2607. 10139v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Selecting the correct answer from a pool of candidate reasoning chains is the engine of test-time scaling, yet the standard selectors each carry a cost: self-consistency inherits the errors of the single model it resamples, and trained reward models need labeled data and transfer poorly off-distribution.

By Ning Liu
arXiv AI
Aug 17

Inducing Reward-Free Judging Rubrics that Reduce Over-Crediting in Agent Evaluation

arXiv:2608. 13564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating language-model agents at scale increasingly relies on a second language model as an automatic judge, because the gold signal, an executable environment reward, is expensive, slow, or unavailable at deployment time.

By Darragh Quinn, David Dylan, Roisin Healy, Fionn Carroll, Maeve Donnelly, Cormac Sheehan