# OPV: Outcome-based Process Verifier for Efficient Long Chain-of-Thought Verification Source: [OPV: Outcome-based Process Verifier for Efficient Long Chain-of-Thought Verification]() Collection index: [llms.txt]() Data updated: 2025-12-15T06:00:00.847Z Authors: Zijian Wu, Lingkai Kong, Wenwei Zhang, Songyang Gao, Yuzhe Gu, Zhongrui Cai, Tianyou Ma, Yuhong Liu, Zhi Wang, Runyuan Ma, Guangyu Wang, Wei Li, Conghui He, Dahua Lin, Kai Chen Published: 2025-12-11T15:47:38.000Z ## Abstract Large language models (LLMs) have achieved significant progress in solving complex reasoning tasks by Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). This advancement is also inseparable from the oversight automated by reliable verifiers. However, current outcome-based verifiers (OVs) are unable to inspect the unreliable intermediate steps in the long reasoning chains of thought (CoTs). Meanwhile, current process-based verifiers (PVs) have difficulties in reliably detecting errors in the complex long CoTs, limited by the scarcity of high-quality annotations due to the prohibitive costs of human annotations. Therefore, we propose the Outcome-based Process Verifier (OPV), which verifies the rationale process of summarized outcomes from long CoTs to achieve both accurate and efficient verification and enable large-scale annotation. To empower the proposed verifier, we adopt an iterative active learning framework with expert annotations to progressively improve the verification capability of OPV with fewer annotation costs. Specifically, in each iteration, the most uncertain cases of the current best OPV are annotated and then subsequently used to train a new OPV through Rejection Fine-Tuning (RFT) and RLVR for the next round. Extensive experiments demonstrate OPV's superior performance and broad applicability. It achieves new state-of-the-art results on our held-out OPV-Bench, outperforming much larger open-source models such as Qwen3-Max-Preview with an F1 score of 83.1 compared to 76.3. Furthermore, OPV effectively detects false positives within synthetic dataset, closely align with expert assessment. When collaborating with policy models, OPV consistently yields performance gains, e.g., raising the accuracy of DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B from 55.2% to 73.3% on AIME2025 as the compute budget scales. ## Recorded benchmark results A research result applies to its stated dataset, split, metric and evaluation configuration. Compare like-for-like settings, preserve the metric's unit and direction, and distinguish paper-reported results from independent reproduction. The best result recorded here is not a claim of exhaustive, current global coverage. - [Process Verification on ProcessBench With Standard Answers](): Process Verification; ProcessBench With Standard Answers; Precise Accuracy: 78.9. - [Process Verification on ProcessBench Without Standard Answers](): Process Verification; ProcessBench Without Standard Answers; Precise Accuracy: 71.9. - [Mathematical Reasoning on AIME 2025 (Pass@k and Voting Metrics)](): Mathematical Reasoning; AIME 2025; Pass@1: not recorded. ## Original sources and implementation [Original paper]() [PDF]()