mlsanityData to 14 Oct 2026

Reasoning Jury: Multi-Model Consensus for Evaluating Reasoning Traces

arXiv 2608.12585 ↗First posted 12 Aug 2026cs.AIcited by 0

On the map: LLM reasoning → Test-time compute and efficient thinking

Abstract (arXiv)

Improving reasoning LLMs requires the ability to judge the quality of long reasoning traces for effective reasoning data curation, strong training signals during reinforcement learning, and an in-depth understanding of reasoning behaviors during model performance evaluation. Additionally, surfacing reasoning mistakes that the model makes would enable improving the model's performance at runtime through providing feedback. Due to the difficulty of this complex task on long reasoning traces, single-model judges (even frontier models) do not do well at identifying reasoning defects. Additionally, leveraging frontier models during online training of reasoning LLMs is generally prohibited due to guardrails in terms of use. In this work, we introduce Reasoning Jury, a system that replaces the single judge with a jury of LLMs and a moderated consensus mechanism, to improve the fidelity of judgments for identifying reasoning defects. In reasoning jury, defects of a reasoning trace and their severity are surfaced through a deliberation where a moderator conducts a discussion amongst the jury where the jurors critique each other's judgments and get to modify their initial votes. The moderator derives a consensus through deliberation amongst jurors or consolidation of judgements. We show that Reasoning Jury with a jury of open-weight models (e.g., gpt-oss-120b) is able to significantly outperform frontier models (opus-4.6, sonnet-4.6, and gemini-3.1-pro) at correctly identifying reasoning defects. Besides accuracy performance improvements, the aggregated cost of the jury (initial verdicts, deliberations, consolidation, etc.) is a fraction (8 to 15%) of the cost of running frontier models in LLM-as-a-judge setup. We also show how these judgements can be leveraged to understand failure modes of reasoning LLMs on benchmarks, which allows much deeper understanding of a model's performance.

Key facts. No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Test-time compute and efficient thinking, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 15 of its 33 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 12 Aug 2026.

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15 of 33 references.

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  1. 2025gpt-oss-120b & gpt-oss-20b Model Card8 Aug

Other references · 14

  1. 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 10,109
  2. 2024A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judgecited by 1,423
  3. 2026GLM-5: from Vibe Coding to Agentic Engineeringcited by 587
  4. 2024Replacing Judges with Juries: Evaluating LLM Generations with a Panel of Diverse Modelscited by 326
  5. 2024ProcessBench: Identifying Process Errors in Mathematical Reasoningcited by 292
  6. 2026Gemma 4 Technical Reportcited by 259
  7. 2026Beyond Benchmarks: MathArena as an Evaluation Platform for Mathematics with LLMscited by 137
  8. 2025NVIDIA Nemotron 3: Efficient and Open Intelligencecited by 65
  9. 2025Scaf-GRPO: Scaffolded Group Relative Policy Optimization for Enhancing LLM Reasoningcited by 52
  10. 2025Stop Summation: Min-Form Credit Assignment Is All Process Reward Model Needs for Reasoningcited by 50
  11. 2025ReasonFlux-PRM: Trajectory-Aware PRMs for Long Chain-of-Thought Reasoning in LLMscited by 46
  12. 2025Multi-Agent-as-Judge: Aligning LLM-Agent-Based Automated Evaluation with Multi-Dimensional Human Evaluationcited by 30
2 more
  1. 2026optimize_anything: A Universal API for Optimizing any Text Parametercited by 4
  2. 2026PRISM: Pushing the Frontier of Deep Think via Process Reward Model-Guided Inferencecited by 3

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  1. 2026LLMs as a Jury: Cross-Model Consensus Can Outperform Process Reward Models for LLM Reasoning
  2. 2025Unleashing the Reasoning Potential of Pre-trained LLMs by Critique Fine-Tuning on One Problem
  3. 2025JudgeLRM: Large Reasoning Models as a Judge
  4. 2026Examining Reasoning LLMs-as-Judges in Non-Verifiable LLM Post-Training
  5. 2025VerifyBench: A Systematic Benchmark for Evaluating Reasoning Verifiers Across Domains
  6. 2026A Single Revision Step Improves Token-Efficient LLM Reasoning
  7. 2025ReasonBENCH: Benchmarking the (In)Stability of LLM Reasoning
  8. 2026ReFlect: An Effective Harness System for Complex Long-Horizon LLM Reasoning