The paper surveys 58 studies on verifier errors in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR), examining how such errors affect training and which mitigations are effective. It finds that the type of error—rather than its frequency—has a larger impact on learning dynamics, with random errors mainly slowing progress and false positives potentially causing learning plateaus or collapse. The authors compile findings into comparison tables, reconcile conflicting reports, and propose a reporting protocol to standardize future research.
By Savyasachi Gupta, Aniruddha Srinivas Joshi
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:2605. 02909v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has become a powerful approach for improving the reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs).
By Kazuki Egashira, Mark Vero, Jasper Dekoninck, Florian E. Dorner, Robin Staab, Martin Vechev
The paper investigates whether verifier errors are independent within groups of completions generated by the Qwen2.5-1.5B model on benchmark datasets. Analyses of 24,998 groups of eight completions reveal a pooled within‑group verifier‑error correlation of 0.530, indicating significant clustering of errors. The degree of dependence varies by answer form, with fractions, radicals, symbolic expressions, and intervals showing stronger clustering than unit annotations and percent signs, and up to 0.83% of groups exhibit disagreement in advantage signs across rule‑based verifier configurations.
By Esther Xin
arXiv:2610.19298v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Reinforcement learning for code usually rewards passing tests, which a model can do while remaining wrong on the inputs the tests do not cover. A progr...
By George Ma, Yuhao Zhang, Bing He, Zeren Shui, Ferhat Erata, Murali Krishna Ramanathan, Somayeh Sojoudi, Hao Zhou
arXiv:2606. 29713v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hallucination is the reliability bottleneck for LLM-based agents, and fact attribution verifiers are the last line of defense -- yet today's verifiers emit only opaque binary labels, leaving agents unable to self-correct and operators unable to audit.
By Aojie Yuan, Yi Nian, Haiyue Zhang, Zijian Su, Yue Zhao
arXiv:2603. 05659v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) and Rubrics as Rewards (RaR) have driven strong gains in domains with clear correctness signals and even in subjective domains by synthesizing evaluation criteria from ideal reference answers.
By Wisdom Ikezogwo, Mehmet Saygin Seyfioglu, Ranjay Krishna, Karim Bouyarmane
The paper investigates whether the reported out‑of‑domain performance gains of Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) are due to improved answer quality or simply to changes in answer formatting. By comparing scores from standard extractors with a custom extractor that distinguishes answers inside a oxed{} notation, the authors find that a large portion (about 82%) of the apparent gains on 7B SimpleRL models vanish, indicating that the gains are largely due to formatting rather than better answers. In contrast, a 32B model trained with a different recipe shows minimal format‑related gains, suggesting that the effect depends on the training setup.
By Zongye Lyu
The paper introduces TRACE, a protocol designed to diagnose whether changes in verifier scores for large language model agents reflect actual changes in agent behavior or merely alterations in the evaluation process. TRACE works by applying targeted changes to evaluation components, running paired experiments, and re‑scoring unchanged trajectories to isolate the source of score variation. Experiments on synthetic tasks and public benchmark tasks demonstrate that seemingly significant score shifts can often be attributed to evaluation artifacts, while TRACE can also detect genuine behavioral changes.
By Radhika Gaonkar
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
The paper introduces a method for co-evolving inspectable verifiers alongside self-improving agents. By synthesizing verifiers from clustered failures and selecting them based on agreement with a reference set, the authors demonstrate improved held‑out agreement on MBPP+ and outperform a bare LLM judge. They also show that removing anchor guards collapses the verifier into a vacuous grader, yet the collapsed verifier still trains skills effectively, indicating that downstream task scores cannot certify a self‑evolved verifier.
By Xing Zhang, Guanghui Wang, Yanwei Cui, Ziyuan Li, Wei Qiu, Bing Zhu, Peiyang He
The paper investigates the reliability of rule- and model-based verifiers used in reinforcement learning with verifiable reward (RLVR) for mathematical reasoning. It finds that rule-based verifiers often miss equivalent answers in different formats, causing false negatives that degrade RL performance as models improve. Model-based verifiers achieve higher static accuracy but become vulnerable to reward hacking during RL, misclassifying certain response patterns as correct after fine-tuning.
By Yuzhen Huang, Weihao Zeng, Xingshan Zeng, Qi Zhu, Junxian He