arXiv AI

ProIQA: A Process-Based Framework for Fine-Grained Math Item Quality Assessment

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 30

RAWR: Reward Assignment Without Rollouts in Verifiable Domains

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...

By Corentin Royer (International Business Machines), Anna Hedstr\"om (ETH AI Center), Debarun Bhattacharjya (Lirio), Gaetano Rossiello (International Business Machines), Andrea Giovannini (International Business Machines), Mennatallah El-Assady (Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich)
arXiv AI
Sep 10

Tracing Mathematical Proficiency Through Problem-Solving Processes

The paper introduces Knowledge Tracing Leveraging Problem‑Solving Process (KT‑PSP), a method that incorporates students’ problem‑solving steps to model mathematical proficiency more comprehensively than traditional knowledge tracing. It presents the KT‑PSP‑25 dataset and a new framework, StatusKT, which uses a teacher‑student‑teacher LLM pipeline to extract proficiency indicators, generate responses, and evaluate mastery. Experiments show that StatusKT improves prediction accuracy and offers interpretable explanations by explicitly modeling proficiency.

By Jungyang Park, Suho Kang, Jaewoo Park, Jaehong Kim, Jaewoo Shin, Seonjoon Park, Youngjae Yu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

SMRC: Aligning Large Language Models with Student Reasoning for Mathematical Error Correction

SMRC is a new method that aligns large language models with student reasoning for mathematical error correction. It treats student reasoning as a multi‑step decision problem and uses Monte Carlo Tree Search to find optimal correction paths, while a breadth‑first search guided by the model generates reward signals that are back‑propagated to supervise intermediate steps. The authors also introduce the MSEB benchmark of 158 high‑school math problems and a dual evaluation protocol focusing on solution accuracy and correct‑step retention, showing that SMRC outperforms existing methods on several datasets.

By Biaojie Zeng, Min Zhang, Juan Zhou, Fengrui Liu, Ruiyang Huang, Yu Song, Xin Lin
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

SPEAR: Distilling Domain-Adaptive Reasoning Skeletons via Sequential Symbolic Alignment in Reinforcement Learning

SPEAR (Symbolic Process Evaluation and Alignment Reward) is a training‑free, plug‑and‑play reward method for on‑policy distillation in reinforcement learning. It converts natural‑language reasoning traces into domain‑adaptive symbolic milestones and uses the longest common subsequence to align student exploration with teacher milestones, producing a dense, order‑aware reward that enforces logical consistency without an external neural verifier. Experiments on math, science, and commonsense reasoning tasks show that SPEAR effectively bridges the reasoning gap between student and teacher models through sequence‑level distillation with efficient dense process rewards.

By Zhuochun Li, Yuelyu Ji, Yiming Zeng, Daqing He
arXiv AI
Sep 24

PotARCin: Multi-Dimensional Evaluation of Skill Acquisition in Abstract Reasoning Tasks

PotARCin expands the ARC benchmark by evaluating abstract reasoning across five dimensions—Definition, Classification, Constrained Generation, Editing, and Inversion—using programmatic generation of new task instances. The study shows a 25‑52 percentage‑point performance gap between standard ARC evaluation and PotARCin, and reveals that multi‑dimensional assessment can reorder models that appear equivalent under single‑metric accuracy. Additionally, a new held‑out set, P‑ARC, demonstrates low model accuracy (1‑8%) across all dimensions, highlighting the need for more comprehensive tests of abstract reasoning.

By Claas Beger, Ryan Yi, Melanie Mitchell