@inproceedings{lee-etal-2026-training,
title = "Training-free {LLM} Verification via Recycling Few-shot Examples",
author = "Lee, Dongseok and
Hong, Jimyung and
Kim, Dongyoung and
Kim, Jaehyung",
editor = "Lee, Hung-Yi and
Dev, Sunipa and
Li, Jessy and
Elliott, Desmond",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1122/",
pages = "25669--25710",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-459-0",
abstract = "Although large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance, the inherent stochasticity of their reasoning processes and varying conclusions present significant challenges. Majority voting or Best-of-N with external verifiers has been explored to mitigate this, but these approaches are limited in applicability or require additional training. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework that Recycles Few-shot examples to verify LLM outputs (ReFeri). Our key idea is to utilize the given few-shot examples not only to generate outputs, but also to evaluate the candidate outputs. Specifically, ReFeri combines a forward confidence score with a backward reconstruction penalty to select candidates that follow few-shot guidance while avoiding demonstration-specific overfitting. Experiments with three different LLMs across seven diverse tasks demonstrate that our framework significantly improves the accuracy of LLMs{---}achieving an average relative gain of 8.2{\%}{---}through effective response selection."
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<abstract>Although large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance, the inherent stochasticity of their reasoning processes and varying conclusions present significant challenges. Majority voting or Best-of-N with external verifiers has been explored to mitigate this, but these approaches are limited in applicability or require additional training. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework that Recycles Few-shot examples to verify LLM outputs (ReFeri). Our key idea is to utilize the given few-shot examples not only to generate outputs, but also to evaluate the candidate outputs. Specifically, ReFeri combines a forward confidence score with a backward reconstruction penalty to select candidates that follow few-shot guidance while avoiding demonstration-specific overfitting. Experiments with three different LLMs across seven diverse tasks demonstrate that our framework significantly improves the accuracy of LLMs—achieving an average relative gain of 8.2%—through effective response selection.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Training-free LLM Verification via Recycling Few-shot Examples
%A Lee, Dongseok
%A Hong, Jimyung
%A Kim, Dongyoung
%A Kim, Jaehyung
%Y Lee, Hung-Yi
%Y Dev, Sunipa
%Y Li, Jessy
%Y Elliott, Desmond
%S Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-459-0
%F lee-etal-2026-training
%X Although large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance, the inherent stochasticity of their reasoning processes and varying conclusions present significant challenges. Majority voting or Best-of-N with external verifiers has been explored to mitigate this, but these approaches are limited in applicability or require additional training. To address this problem, we propose a novel framework that Recycles Few-shot examples to verify LLM outputs (ReFeri). Our key idea is to utilize the given few-shot examples not only to generate outputs, but also to evaluate the candidate outputs. Specifically, ReFeri combines a forward confidence score with a backward reconstruction penalty to select candidates that follow few-shot guidance while avoiding demonstration-specific overfitting. Experiments with three different LLMs across seven diverse tasks demonstrate that our framework significantly improves the accuracy of LLMs—achieving an average relative gain of 8.2%—through effective response selection.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1122/
%P 25669-25710
Markdown (Informal)
[Training-free LLM Verification via Recycling Few-shot Examples](https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1122/) (Lee et al., EMNLP 2026)
ACL