# Rethinking Math Reasoning Evaluation: A Robust LLM-as-a-Judge Framework Beyond Symbolic Rigidity

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.22597 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22597/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Mathematical reasoning, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 23 of its 37 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 24 Apr 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Mathematical reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/lr/mathematical-reasoning/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.11171/) (2022)
- [Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.03874/) (2021)
- [A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15594/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5-Math Technical Report: Toward Mathematical Expert Model via Self-Improvement](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.12122/) (2024)
- [Tulu 3: Pushing Frontiers in Open Language Model Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15124/) (2024)
- [Does Reinforcement Learning Really Incentivize Reasoning Capacity in LLMs Beyond the Base Model?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.13837/) (2025)
- [GSM-Symbolic: Understanding the Limitations of Mathematical Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.05229/) (2024)
- [SimpleRL-Zoo: Investigating and Taming Zero Reinforcement Learning for Open Base Models in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.18892/) (2025)
- [From Crowdsourced Data to High-Quality Benchmarks: Arena-Hard and BenchBuilder Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11939/) (2024)
- [LLMs-as-Judges: A Comprehensive Survey on LLM-based Evaluation Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.05579/) (2024)
- [Justice or Prejudice? Quantifying Biases in LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02736/) (2024)
- [JudgeBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-based Judges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12784/) (2024)
- [Omni-MATH: A Universal Olympiad Level Mathematic Benchmark For Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.07985/) (2024)
- [Large Language Models for Data Annotation and Synthesis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13446/) (2024)
- [Meta-Rewarding Language Models: Self-Improving Alignment with LLM-as-a-Meta-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.19594/) (2024)
- [Do Large Language Model Benchmarks Test Reliability?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.03461/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Large Language Models: A Focus on Error Identification and Correction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.00755/) (2024)
- [From Calculation to Adjudication: Examining LLM judges on Mathematical Reasoning Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.04168/) (2024)
- [Let's Verify Math Questions Step by Step](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.13903/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [GSM-SEM: Benchmark and Framework for Generating Semantically Variant Augmentations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.07053/) (2026)
- [Magenta: Closing the Loop Between Mathematical Reasoning and Lean Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.11319/) (2026)
- [AdvancedMathBench: A Benchmark Suite for Advanced Mathematical Proof Generation and Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.11849/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in large language models have led to significant improvements across various tasks, including mathematical reasoning, which is used to assess models' intelligence in logical reasoning and problem-solving. Models are evaluated on mathematical reasoning benchmarks by verifying the correctness of the final answer against a ground truth answer. A common approach for this verification is based on symbolic mathematics comparison, which fails to generalize across diverse mathematical representations and solution formats. In this work, we offer a robust and flexible alternative to rule-based symbolic mathematics comparison. We propose an LLM-based evaluation framework for evaluating model-generated answers, enabling accurate evaluation across diverse mathematical representations and answer formats. We present failure cases of symbolic evaluation in two popular frameworks, Lighteval and SimpleRL, and compare them to our approach, demonstrating clear improvements over commonly used methods. Our framework enables more reliable evaluation and benchmarking, leading to more accurate performance monitoring, which is important for advancing mathematical problem-solving and intelligent systems.