FABSVer: Faster Training and Better Self-Verification for LLM Mathematical Reasoning

Abstract: While LLMs have made significant progress in mathematical reasoning, they remain unreliable at judging the correctness of their own solutions. Existing approaches that equip models with self-verification typically treat solution generation and verification as two separate tasks, leading to substantially increased training time. In this paper, we propose FABSVer, which fuses these two tasks into a single generation pass, dramatically reducing training overhead while jointly optimizing both capabilities. We further identify a convergence bottleneck both theoretically and empirically: as training progresses, the reward reaches a plateau because the policy is constrained by a fixed reference model. To overcome this, we introduce Dynamic Reference Model Update (DRMU), which raises the reward ceiling and enables sustained reward growth. Extensive experiments on math benchmarks demonstrate that FABSVer achieves superior self-verification and reasoning performance across three model scales, while requiring only 51%--71% of the training time of existing methods. Analysis further reveals distinct learning phases in how models acquire self-verification, and that the gap between verify and answer rewards shrinks noticeably as model size increases.