Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional reasoning capabilities, and co-evolving paradigms have shown promising results in domains with verifiable reward signals, such as code and math. However, in unverifiable domains, such as scientific reasoning, these methods remain fragile due to unreliable solution evaluation and limited diversity in verification strategies. In this work, we propose Sci-CoE, a two-stage co-evolving framework for domains without verifiable feedback. The framework enables models to self-evolve as both solvers and verifiers by transitioning from sparse supervision to unsupervised learning. In the first stage, the model uses a small set of annotated data to establish fundamental correctness judgment anchors for the Verifier. In the second stage, we introduce a geometric reward mechanism that jointly considers consensus, reliability, and diversity, driving large-scale self-iteration on unlabeled data. Experiments on several general scientific benchmarks demonstrate that Sci-CoE enhances complex reasoning capabilities and exhibits strong scalability, facilitating the construction of more robust and diverse evaluation systems. Codes are available at https://github.com/InternScience/Sci-CoE.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1: Positioning of feedback paradigms for scientific reasoning along two axes: the structure and inspectability of the feedback (horizontal) and the adaptivity of the verification behavior (vertical).
Fig. 2: An example scientific question with a generated candidate solution and multiple natural-language verification strategies. Each strategy examines a different aspect of the solution, such as validating physical properties or performing an independent reverse calculation, rather than directly producing another answer.
Paradigm
Sparse labels
Task checker
Explicit strategies
Diversity control
Unlabeled adaptation
RLHF / RLAIF
Required
No
No
No
Limited
RLVR
Not required
Required
No
No
Yes
Direct LLM-as-a-Judge
No
No
No
No
Yes
Solver–Verifier self-play
Varies
Usually
Varies
Limited
Varies
Sci-CoE (ours)
Stage 1 only
No
Yes
Geometric
Yes (Stage 2)
TABLE I: Conceptual comparison of feedback paradigms for reasoning. “Task checker” denotes a task-specific executable or exact verifier; “Explicit strategies” denotes an inspectable, natural-language verification procedure; “Diversity control” denotes an explicit mechanism against homogeneous verification.
Fig. 3: Overall pipeline of Sci-CoE. A single shared policy is prompted as Solver to generate candidate solutions and as Verifier to generate natural-language verification strategies. Stage 1 anchors both roles with a small labeled set; Stage 2 co-evolves them on unlabeled questions using consensus and geometric rewards.
Scale
MegaScience
NuminaMath
Other
4k
Phy 1k, Bio 1k, Chem 1k
1k
–
18k
Phy 5k, Bio 2k, Chem 2k, Med 1k, Math 1k, CS 1k, Eco 1k
5k
–
30k
Phy 5k, Bio 4k, Chem 4k, Med 4k, Math 2k, CS 2k, Eco 2k
5k
ScienceQA 1k, CaseHold 1k
TABLE II: Training Data Composition of Different Scales. The second column represents the subset composition of disciplines in MegaScience.
Fig. 4: Performance of the model at different stages of the training process on GPQA-D evaluation data, the three broken lines represent the average accuracy of the generated solutions, the average accuracy of the generated validation strategies and Best-of-N(BoN) accuracy, using 16 generated solutions and 16 generated strategies. The baseline is Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct, and the rest of the model names represent the number of training steps in that stage.
Model
Overall
Bio.
Bus.
Che.
C.S.
Eco.
Eng.
Hea.
His.
Law
Math
Phi.
Phy.
Psy.
Oth.
Other Models
Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct
44.25
63.04
49.30
37.63
48.29
55.09
29.72
50.73
42.26
27.25
43.82
44.49
40.26
60.03
44.81
Ministral-8B-Instruct
37.93
59.00
39.42
26.41
44.88
49.29
23.12
43.28
43.83
25.98
41.15
36.47
29.18
51.63
40.15
Mathstral-7B-v0.1
42.00
63.46
42.08
38.78
45.61
51.78
38.39
39.24
35.96
22.43
47.67
38.28
38.03
52.63
40.91
Yi-1.5-9B-Chat
45.95
66.67
54.25
39.49
50.00
60.19
33.23
43.52
40.94
26.61
52.48
40.08
41.42
59.40
44.91
Mistral-Small-Instruct
48.40
71.69
52.72
36.84
53.66
60.07
30.55
53.79
50.13
31.97
50.85
48.10
40.34
63.91
55.09
TABLE III: Main Results on MMLU-Pro. We report the accuracy (%) on MMLU-Pro and its subsets. The best results within each model block and benchmark are highlighted in bold , and underline indicates the second best.
Model
Data Scale
Overall Acc
Mec. and Ther.
Elec.
Modern Physics
Other Models
Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct
–
14.66
12.64
14.35
16.80
Ministral-8B-Instruct-2410
–
16.39
13.95
15.52
19.20
Mathstral-7B-v0.1
–
17.45
14.82
17.77
19.94
Yi-1.5-9B-Chat
–
17.61
16.00
15.85
19.94
Mistral-Small-Instruct-2409
–
25.72
22.71
22.70
29.97
TABLE IV: Main Results on UGPhysics. We report the accuracy (%) on the English subset of UGPhysics. The best results within each model block and benchmark are highlighted in bold , and underline indicates the second best. In case of ties, all tied results are marked. “Mec.”, “Elec.” and “Modern” stand for Mechanics & Thermodynamics, Electromagnetism, and Modern Physics subsets of UGPhysics. We use Qwen3-235B-A22B as the judging model.
Model
Data Scale
Overall Acc
Physics
Chemistry
Biology
Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct
Base Model
–
30.81
33.73
24.73
47.37
Sci-CoE-Stage 1
4k
31.31
34.88
24.73
47.37
Sci-CoE-Stage 2
18k
33.33
41.86
23.66
42.11
Sci-CoE-Stage 2
30k
35.35
41.86
26.88
47.37
Qwen3-8B
TABLE V: Main Results on GPQA-Diamond. We report the accuracy (%) on GPQA-Diamond and its subsets. The best results within each model block and benchmark are highlighted in bold , and underline indicates the second best.
Fig. 5: Visualization of geometric reward and quantitative analysis of verification strategies. (a)-(d) display PCA projections of strategy embeddings in a polar coordinate system across different training stages, respectively corresponding to Baseline Model, Stage 1 only, Stage 2 with Naive Consensus Reward, and Stage 2 with Geometric Reward. The angular distribution of points indicates diversity, while the radial distance to the cluster center represents strategy reliability, with closer points indicating more stable. And the color represents the consistency score, with closer to green indicating higher scores. (e)-(g) illustrate mean consistency, reliability, and diversity reward scores of different models.
VB-Hard
Num
Exp
MC
Str
SCI-VB
Math
Physics
Chemistry
Biology
QA
Qwen3-8B
75.20
70.24
76.14
81.16
69.13
82.36
87.00
76.20
81.40
85.80
81.40
Sci-CoE-Stage 1-4k
75.90
71.43
73.86
81.86
70.43
82.48
87.00
76.80
83.40
83.00
82.20
Sci-CoE-Stage 2-18k
75.80
69.44
80.68
82.33
68.70
82.60
87.20
76.80
82.40
83.80
82.80
Sci-CoE-Stage 2-30k
76.10
70.24
76.14
81.63
72.17
83.36
86.80
79.20
83.20
84.40
83.20
TABLE VI: Results on Verification Capability Benchmarks. We report the results on VerifyBench-Hard and SCI-VerifyBench. The best results within each column are highlighted in bold , and underline indicates the second best.
Data Scale
RM-Bench
Chat
Code
Math
Safety
Easy
Normal
Hard
Qwen3-8B
–
83.90
78.29
71.83
91.28
94.18
90.32
86.65
74.72
Sci-CoE-Stage 1
4k
84.49
81.31
71.49
91.47
93.68
90.50
86.83
76.12
Sci-CoE-Stage 2
18k
84.34
80.28
71.49
91.79
93.80
90.90
86.36
75.76
Sci-CoE-Stage 2
30k
84.50
80.79
71.78
91.45
93.98
90.91
86.68
75.91
TABLE VII: Results on Reward Model Benchmark RM-Bench and its subsets. The best results within each column are highlighted in bold , and underline indicates the second best.
Index
Anchored Learning
Stage1 Data Scale
Geometric Reward
GPQA-D
MMLU-Pro
UGPhysics
Avg Acc
Baseline
–
–
–
61.62
63.19
31.76
43.94
1
✗
✗
✗
58.08
63.00
31.61
43.49
2
✓
0.4k
✗
62.12
63.36
31.79
44.17
3
✓
4k
✗
63.13
63.27
32.07
44.41
4
✓
4k
✓
64.14
63.53
32.46
44.96
TABLE VIII: Ablation study on Scientific Reasoning benchmarks.
Model
Verification Strategy
GPQA-D
MMLU-Pro
UGPhysics
Avg Acc
Base Model
-
61.62
63.19
31.76
43.94
Alternative Reward Signals
Direct-Judge Model
✗
58.08
62.98
31.25
42.50
Self-Judge Model
✓
59.60
63.16
31.45
42.74
Ours
Sci-CoE
✓
64.14
63.53
32.46
44.96
TABLE IX: Ablation Study on the Source of Verification Signals. We compare different reward mechanisms using the Qwen3-8B backbone. Direct-Judge Model relies on a 235B model’s zero-shot evaluation without strategies. Self-Judge Model uses the policy model itself to execute the generated strategies. Both lead to performance degradation, highlighting the necessity of our decoupled strategy-execution paradigm.
Data
GPQA-D
MMLU-Pro
UGPhysics
Qwen3.5-9B
–
81.31
81.06
45.07
Sci-CoE-Stage 1
4k
81.31
81.27
44.38
Sci-CoE-Stage 2
18k
79.29
81.34
45.96
Qwen3.5-4B
–
71.21
78.25
43.57
Sci-CoE-Stage 1
4k
74.24
78.28
43.35
Sci-CoE-Stage 2
18k
73.74
78.38
43.61
TABLE X: Results under different scale models. We report the results on three benchmarks using different-sized models in the Qwen3.5 series. The best results within each model block and benchmark are highlighted in bold .
Fig. 6: Prompts for the Solver, Verifier, GT-test, and Judging Model in Sci-CoE.
Fig. 7: Case study of complementary strategy verification.