# FineVerify: Scaling Test-Time Compute with Fine-Grained Self-Verification for Agentic Search

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.00660 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.00660/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning for agents, planning and code, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 23 of its 59 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 May 2026.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning for agents, planning and code](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-for-agents-planning-and-code/)
- LLM agents and tool use / [Web, search, and research agents](https://mlsanity.com/agents/web-search-and-research-agents/)

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

- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.12948/) (2025)
- [WebGPT: Browser-assisted question-answering with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09332/) (2021)
- [Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05176/) (2025)
- [OpenAI GPT-5 System Card](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.03267/) (2025)
- [BrowseComp: A Simple Yet Challenging Benchmark for Browsing Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12516/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Test-Time Scaling in Large Language Models: What, How, Where, and How Well?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.24235/) (2025)
- [Scaling Long-Horizon LLM Agent via Context-Folding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.11967/) (2025)
- [xbench: Tracking Agents Productivity Scaling with Profession-Aligned Real-World Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.13651/) (2025)
- [Recursive Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.24601/) (2025)
- [DeepSeekMath-V2: Towards Self-Verifiable Mathematical Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.22570/) (2025)
- [Winning Gold at IMO 2025 with a Model-Agnostic Verification-and-Refinement Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.15855/) (2025)
- [WebResearcher: Unleashing unbounded reasoning capability in Long-Horizon Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.13309/) (2025)
- [Tongyi DeepResearch Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24701/) (2025)
- [From Web Search towards Agentic Deep Research: Incentivizing Search with Reasoning Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18959/) (2025)
- [DeepSearchQA: Bridging the Comprehensiveness Gap for Deep Research Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20975/) (2026)
- [The Majority is not always right: RL training for solution aggregation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.06870/) (2025)
- [Learning to Reason Across Parallel Samples for LLM Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09014/) (2025)
- [Benchmark Test-Time Scaling of General LLM Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.18998/) (2026)
- [Agentic Aggregation for Parallel Scaling of Long-Horizon Agentic Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11753/) (2026)
- [ParallelMuse: Agentic Parallel Thinking for Deep Information Seeking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.24698/) (2025)
- [RE-Searcher: Robust Agentic Search with Goal-oriented Planning and Self-reflection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.26048/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Stochasticity in Deep Research Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.23271/) (2026)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [VeriHarness: Scaling Agentic Verification for Long-Horizon Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.00972/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Agentic search requires language model agents to explore many sources and answer complex information-seeking questions. Scaling test-time compute is a promising way to improve these agents, but current approaches can fail, because correct answers are often sparse and score-based selection depends on model calibration. We propose FineVerify, a fine-grained self-verification framework that decomposes each question into checkable sub-questions, verifies sampled candidates against each sub-question, and selects the candidate with the highest aggregated score. This per-check structure turns selection into simpler local judgments and produces scores under the same explicit criteria. Across four agentic search benchmarks and two models, FineVerify consistently outperforms standard scaling baselines. With only four sampled trajectories, it improves GPT-5-mini by 8.2 accuracy points and Gemini-3-flash by 5.6% on average. With 12 samples, FineVerify enables GPT-5-mini to surpass frontier GPT-5 on BrowseComp-Plus. Beyond accuracy, FineVerify produces interpretable verification traces that help audit benchmark errors, suggesting broader applications for inspecting agentic search systems. Code and data are available at https://github.com/XuZhao0/fineverify