Trust but Verify! A Survey on Verification Design for Test-time Scaling

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Main Authors: Venktesh, V, Rathee, Mandeep, Anand, Avishek
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Venktesh, V
Rathee, Mandeep
Anand, Avishek
author_facet Venktesh, V
Rathee, Mandeep
Anand, Avishek
contents Test-time scaling (TTS) has emerged as a new frontier for scaling the performance of Large Language Models. In test-time scaling, by using more computational resources during inference, LLMs can improve their reasoning process and task performance. Several approaches have emerged for TTS such as distilling reasoning traces from another model or exploring the vast decoding search space by employing a verifier. The verifiers serve as reward models that help score the candidate outputs from the decoding process to diligently explore the vast solution space and select the best outcome. This paradigm commonly termed has emerged as a superior approach owing to parameter free scaling at inference time and high performance gains. The verifiers could be prompt-based, fine-tuned as a discriminative or generative model to verify process paths, outcomes or both. Despite their widespread adoption, there is no detailed collection, clear categorization and discussion of diverse verification approaches and their training mechanisms. In this survey, we cover the diverse approaches in the literature and present a unified view of verifier training, types and their utility in test-time scaling. Our repository can be found at https://github.com/elixir-research-group/Verifierstesttimescaling.github.io.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_16665
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Trust but Verify! A Survey on Verification Design for Test-time Scaling
Venktesh, V
Rathee, Mandeep
Anand, Avishek
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Test-time scaling (TTS) has emerged as a new frontier for scaling the performance of Large Language Models. In test-time scaling, by using more computational resources during inference, LLMs can improve their reasoning process and task performance. Several approaches have emerged for TTS such as distilling reasoning traces from another model or exploring the vast decoding search space by employing a verifier. The verifiers serve as reward models that help score the candidate outputs from the decoding process to diligently explore the vast solution space and select the best outcome. This paradigm commonly termed has emerged as a superior approach owing to parameter free scaling at inference time and high performance gains. The verifiers could be prompt-based, fine-tuned as a discriminative or generative model to verify process paths, outcomes or both. Despite their widespread adoption, there is no detailed collection, clear categorization and discussion of diverse verification approaches and their training mechanisms. In this survey, we cover the diverse approaches in the literature and present a unified view of verifier training, types and their utility in test-time scaling. Our repository can be found at https://github.com/elixir-research-group/Verifierstesttimescaling.github.io.
title Trust but Verify! A Survey on Verification Design for Test-time Scaling
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.16665