Putting the Value Back in RL: Better Test-Time Scaling by Unifying LLM
  Reasoners With Verifiers
Authors: name: Kusha Sareen; name: Morgane M Moss; name: Alessandro Sordoni; name: Rishabh Agarwal; name: Arian Hosseini
Published: 2025-05-07 22:41:26

Abstract: Prevalent reinforcement learning~(RL) methods for fine-tuning LLM reasoners,
such as GRPO or Leave-one-out PPO, abandon the learned value function in favor
of empirically estimated returns. This hinders test-time compute scaling that
relies on using the value-function for verification. In this work, we propose
RL^V that augments any ``value-free'' RL method by jointly training the LLM
as both a reasoner and a generative verifier using RL-generated data, adding
verification capabilities without significant overhead. Empirically, RL^V
boosts MATH accuracy by over 20\% with parallel sampling and enables
8-32times efficient test-time compute scaling compared to the base RL
method. RL^V also exhibits strong generalization capabilities for both
easy-to-hard and out-of-domain tasks. Furthermore, RL^V achieves
1.2-1.6times higher performance when jointly scaling parallel and sequential
test-time compute with a long reasoning R1 model.