Scaling LLM Reasoning from Minimal Labels: A Semi-Supervised Framework with a Lightweight Verifier

Keizo Kato, Chenhui Chu, Yugo Murawaki, Sadao Kurohashi


Abstract
For the development of Large language models (LLMs), recent approaches to generating pseudo intermediate reasoning have shown remarkable progress. But they typically rely on large numbers of correctly annotated answers to assess reasoning quality. This paper presents a semi-supervised framework that scales reasoning learning from minimal supervision, turning reasoning verification itself into a data creation mechanism. We train a lightweight reasoning-correctness classifier on only a few labeled samples, which judges whether intermediate reasoning traces generated by an LLM are valid. Furthermore, an entropy-based confidence threshold filters out unreliable samples, and the remaining high-confidence reasoning traces are used to fine-tune the model. Experiments on Verifiable Math Problems (Orca-Math subset) and Question Answering on Image Scene Graphs (GQA) with Visual Programming show that our method achieves accuracy comparable to using 10–15× more labeled data. Ablation analyses confirm that both the classifier and entropy filtering are essential for scalable and noise-resistant pseudo-labeling. By replacing expensive answer-level supervision with lightweight reasoning verification, our method provides a practical path toward constructing large-scale reasoning resources and paves the way for future autonomous reasoning systems that learn from minimal human input.
Anthology ID:
2026.lrec-main.487
Volume:
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Language Resources and Evaluation Conference
Month:
May
Year:
2026
Address:
Palma de Mallorca, Spain
Editors:
Stelios Piperidis, Núria Bel, Henk van den Heuvel, Nancy Ide, Simon Krek, Antonio Toral
Venue:
LREC
SIG:
Publisher:
ELRA Language Resource Association
Note:
Pages:
6155–6165
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.487/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Keizo Kato, Chenhui Chu, Yugo Murawaki, and Sadao Kurohashi. 2026. Scaling LLM Reasoning from Minimal Labels: A Semi-Supervised Framework with a Lightweight Verifier. International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation, main:6155–6165.
Cite (Informal):
Scaling LLM Reasoning from Minimal Labels: A Semi-Supervised Framework with a Lightweight Verifier (Kato et al., LREC 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-lrec/2026.lrec-main.487.pdf