The Hidden Bias of Process Reward Models:PRISM for Rewarding the Right Reasoning
arXiv:2606. 09078v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Process Reward Models (PRMs) improve credit assignment for reasoning by providing step-level feedback.
arXiv:2606. 09078v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Process Reward Models (PRMs) improve credit assignment for reasoning by providing step-level feedback.
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:2606. 11209v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Visual question answering increasingly requires multi-step reasoning.
Long-horizon large language model (LLM) agents are typically optimized with sparse terminal outcomes, making fine-grained credit assignment across multi-step interactions difficult. Existing approache...
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:2601. 03555v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training reliable tool-augmented agents remains a significant challenge, largely due to the difficulty of credit assignment in multi-step reasoning.
arXiv:2603.17815v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Understanding and evaluating multi-step reasoning in LLMs at the level of individual steps remains a key challenge. Process reward models (PRMs) pr...
arXiv:2609.37119v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent approaches to reinforcement learning (RL) post-training for large language models increasingly remove the critic to reduce training instabilit...
arXiv:2607. 02869v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a promising paradigm for improving mathematical reasoning in language models.
arXiv:2606. 26080v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Process reward models enable fine-grained, step-level evaluation of LLMs, yet building them for agentic settings remains prohibitively difficult: long-horizon interactions, irreversible actions, and stochastic environment feedback make both human annotation and Monte Carlo estimation infeasible at scale.
The paper introduces the Implicit Prefix-Value Reward Model (IPVRM), which learns the probability of eventual correctness for each prefix directly from outcome labels, thereby aligning training targets with inference-time step signals via temporal-difference differences. IPVRM improves step-verification F1 on ProcessBench. Additionally, the authors propose Distribution-Level RL (DistRL), a policy optimization method that applies TD advantages to both sampled and high-probability tokens, offering dense counterfactual updates without extra rollouts, and show that DistRL consistently enhances downstream reasoning when combined with IPVRM.
arXiv:2507. 01551v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Process Reinforcement Learning~(PRL) has demonstrated considerable potential in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models~(LLMs).