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Trust, But Verify: A Self-Verification Approach to Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards

Artificial Intelligence 2025-05-20 v1 Computation and Language

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) show great promise in complex reasoning, with Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) being a key enhancement strategy. However, a prevalent issue is ``superficial self-reflection'', where models fail to robustly verify their own outputs. We introduce RISE (Reinforcing Reasoning with Self-Verification), a novel online RL framework designed to tackle this. RISE explicitly and simultaneously trains an LLM to improve both its problem-solving and self-verification abilities within a single, integrated RL process. The core mechanism involves leveraging verifiable rewards from an outcome verifier to provide on-the-fly feedback for both solution generation and self-verification tasks. In each iteration, the model generates solutions, then critiques its own on-policy generated solutions, with both trajectories contributing to the policy update. Extensive experiments on diverse mathematical reasoning benchmarks show that RISE consistently improves model's problem-solving accuracy while concurrently fostering strong self-verification skills. Our analyses highlight the advantages of online verification and the benefits of increased verification compute. Additionally, RISE models exhibit more frequent and accurate self-verification behaviors during reasoning. These advantages reinforce RISE as a flexible and effective path towards developing more robust and self-aware reasoners.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2505.13445,
  title  = {Trust, But Verify: A Self-Verification Approach to Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards},
  author = {Xiaoyuan Liu and Tian Liang and Zhiwei He and Jiahao Xu and Wenxuan Wang and Pinjia He and Zhaopeng Tu and Haitao Mi and Dong Yu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2505.13445},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

code available at https://github.com/xyliu-cs/RISE