ProcessThinker: Enhancing Multi-modal Large Language Models Reasoning via Rollout-based Process Reward
arXiv:2606. 11209v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual question answering increasingly requires multi-step 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:2606. 11209v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual question answering increasingly requires multi-step reasoning.
arXiv:2609.35942v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Recent work in visual question answering has shown that vision-language models can exhibit strong reasoning capabilities by translating visual inputs i...
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.
arXiv:2606. 09078v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Process Reward Models (PRMs) improve credit assignment for reasoning by providing step-level feedback.
arXiv:2605.07872v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Multimodal reward models have advanced substantially in text and image domains, yet progress in video understanding reward modeling remains s...
arXiv:2609.36641v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Process reward models (PRMs) have become a key component for LLMs, as their step-level feedback supports both post-training and test-time reasoning....
arXiv:2512.03244v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Training process reward models (PRMs) requires step-level correctness labels, obtained either through expensive human annotation or by relyin...
arXiv:2607. 16205v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has emerged as a standard approach for enhancing reasoning in large language models, which typically optimizes the policy by contrasting multiple self generated rollouts.
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.
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.
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.
arXiv:2604. 04917v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: What does it take to build a visual reasoner that works across charts, science, spatial understanding, and open-ended tasks?