Verifier-Guided Self-Consistency: Test-Time Reasoning with Imperfect Generators and Verifiers

Ekaterina Fadeeva, Xueyan Li, Mrinmaya Sachan, Maxim Panov

Large language models can solve many multi-step reasoning problems, but their reasoning remains brittle: plausible intermediate steps often lead to incorrect answers. Improving reasoning at test time requires balancing two imperfect signals: the generator, which provides diversity, and the verifier, which guides correctness. Existing approaches largely favor one side of this tradeoff. Verifier-weighted voting relies on trajectories sampled from the generator and cannot steer generation toward correct ones. By contrast, beam-style verifier-guided search can steer generation, but may over-concentrate on narrow trajectory sets and amplify verifier errors. We propose Verifier-Guided Self-Consistency (VGSC), a stochastic decoding framework that combines step-level correctness and future-outcome estimates to guide reasoning during generation. VGSC repeatedly proposes candidate next steps from the base language model and uses both signals in an acceptance/resampling procedure, while maintaining multiple trajectories for final answer-level self-consistency. We provide a probabilistic interpretation of VGSC as approximate sampling from a verifier-tilted trajectory distribution. Across…