arXiv Machine Learning

VRPRM: Process Reward Modeling via Visual Reasoning

arXiv:2508. 03556v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Process Reward Model (PRM) is widely used in the post-training of Large Language Model (LLM) because it can perform fine-grained evaluation of the reasoning steps of generated content.

arXiv AI
6d ago

Stepwise Intrinsic Rewards for Reasoning in Large Language Models

The paper introduces Stepwise Marginal Information Gain (MIG), an intrinsic process reward that evaluates how each reasoning step of a large language model (LLM) or vision-language model (VLM) improves the likelihood of the reference answer. MIG rewards only new likelihood maxima, preventing duplicate credit, and is combined with outcome, format, and self‑distillation objectives to guide training. Experiments on eight benchmarks show that this method outperforms outcome‑only reinforcement learning and improves accuracy by up to 4.8 points over binary‑reward training, including a 12.6‑point gain on MathVerse and a 12.9‑point advantage on vision‑language transfer at 7B parameters.

By Xiangwei Wang, Wei Wang, Ken Chen, Nanduni Nimalsiri, Sachith Seneviratne, Saman Halgamuge
arXiv AI
Jun 26

Joint Reward Modeling: Internalizing Chain-of-Thought for Efficient Visual Reward Models

arXiv:2602. 07533v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Reward models are critical for reinforcement learning from human feedback, as they determine the alignment quality and reliability of generative models.

By Yankai Yang, Yancheng Long, Hongyang Wei, Wei Chen, Tianke Zhang, Kaiyu Jiang, Haonan Fan, Changyi Liu, Jiankang Chen, Kaiyu Tang, Bin Wen, Fan Yang, Tingting Gao, Han Li, Shuo Yang
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Zipping the Thought: When and How Compressed Reasoning Data Works in LLM Post-Training

The paper investigates how different forms of compressed chain‑of‑thought (CoT) reasoning—Explicit, Composed, and Implicit—affect large language model (LLM) performance after supervised fine‑tuning (SFT). Using a synthetic compositional reasoning task, the authors show that coarser CoT requires more SFT data, that Composed and Implicit CoT benefit more from data scaling (with Composed also benefiting from repetition), and that reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) can decompose compressed steps learned during SFT. Additionally, unidirectional CoT ordering improves generalization on longer sequential tasks.

By Kohsei Matsutani, Gouki Minegishi, Takeshi Kojima, Yusuke Iwasawa, Yutaka Matsuo
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

On Asymmetric Optimization of Reasoning and Perception in Vision-Language Model Post-Training

The paper investigates why post‑training boosts reasoning more than perception in vision‑language models. Using a diagnostic framework with synthetic tasks, it finds a perception‑reasoning asymmetry: supervised fine‑tuning suffers from token imbalance, while reinforcement learning suffers from reward coupling. The authors propose reweighting losses and perception‑aware rewards, achieving up to 18.2‑point and 6.0‑point gains respectively, and show that these methods also improve real‑world visual reasoning by up to 3.3 points.

By Xueqing Wu, Yu-Chi Lin, Kai-Wei Chang, Nanyun Peng