Logic-Regularized Verifier Elicits Reasoning from LLMs

Xinyu Wang, Changzhi Sun, Lian Cheng, Yuanbin Wu, Dell Zhang, Xiaoling Wang, Xuelong Li*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

Verifiers are crucial components for enhancing modern LLMs' reasoning capability. Typical verifiers require resource-intensive supervised dataset construction, which is costly and faces limitations in data diversity. In this paper, we propose LOVER, an unsupervised verifier regularized by logical rules. LOVER treats the verifier as a binary latent variable, utilizing internal activations and enforcing three logical constraints on multiple reasoning paths: negation consistency, intra-group consistency, and inter-group consistency (grouped by the final answer). By incorporating logical rules as priors, LOVER can leverage unlabeled examples and is directly compatible with any off-the-shelf LLMs. Experiments on 10 datasets demonstrate that LOVER significantly outperforms unsupervised baselines, achieving performance comparable to the supervised verifier (reaching its 95% level on average). The source code is publicly available at https://github.com/wangxinyufighting/llm-lover.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationLong Papers
EditorsWanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
PublisherAssociation for Computational Linguistics (ACL)
Pages32617-32630
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9798891762510
StatePublished - 2025
Event63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2025 - Vienna, Austria
Duration: 27 Jul 20251 Aug 2025

Publication series

NameProceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Volume1
ISSN (Print)0736-587X

Conference

Conference63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2025
Country/TerritoryAustria
CityVienna
Period27/07/251/08/25

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