REVES: REvision and VErification–Augmented Training for Test-Time Scaling

Yuanxin Liu, Ruida Zhou, Xinyan Zhao, Amr Sharaf, Hongzhou Lin, Arijit Biswas, Mohammad Ghavamzadeh, Zhaoran Wang, Mingyi Hong

Keywords: LLM, Test time scaling

Abstract: Test-time scaling via sequential revision has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing Large Language Model (LLM) reasoning. However, standard post-training methods primarily optimize single-shot objectives, creating a fundamental misalignment with multi-step inference dynamics. While recent work treats this as multi-turn reinforcement learning (RL), conventional approaches optimize over the multi-step trajectories directly, failing to further exploit the high-quality mistakes in intermediate steps that model can learn from correcting them. We propose a two-stage iterative framework that alternates between online data/prompt augmentation and policy optimization. By converting the intermediate steps (``near-miss" answers) in the successful recovery trajectories into decoupled revision and verification prompts, our approach concentrates training on both effective answer transformation and error identification. This approach enables efficient off-policy data generation and reduces the computational overhead of long-horizon sampling compared to standard multi-turn RL. On LiveCodeBench, using publicly available test cases as feedback, we observe gains of +6.5 points over the RL baseline and +4.0 points over standard multi-turn training. Beyond coding, our approach matches the previously reported SOTA result on circle packing. Math results under ground-truth verification further confirm improved correction ability. It also generalizes to out-of-distribution constraint-satisfaction puzzles such as n\_queens and mini\_sudoku, where correctness is defined entirely by problem constraints.

Submission Number: 52