arXiv AI

ScalePRM: Training Process Reward Models by Scaling Verification Compute Without Ground Truth

arXiv AI
Oct 2

Your Language Model is Its Own Critic: Reinforcement Learning with Value Estimation from Actor's Internal States

The paper introduces POISE, a reinforcement learning algorithm that uses a model’s internal states as a value estimator to reduce variance in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). By employing a lightweight probe that reads internal signals during the forward pass, POISE predicts baselines online and uses a cross‑rollout construction to keep gradients unbiased. Experiments on Qwen3‑4B and OLMo3‑7B‑Instruct‑DPO across six domains show POISE outperforms existing RLVR baselines, offering more stable training and a value model that generalizes across tasks and scales with the policy.

By Yunho Choi, Jongwon Lim, Woojin Ahn, Minjae Oh, Jeonghoon Shim, Yohan Jo
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 4

Gradients Know What Outcomes Don't: Unlocking Reinforcement Learning for LLM Reasoning with Gradient-Aligned Rewards

The paper introduces Gradient-Aligned Reward (GAR), a reinforcement learning technique that uses truncated backpropagation to generate a compact gradient vector for each rollout and compares it to an expert-anchor gradient via cosine similarity. This dense, reasoning-aware reward improves large language model chain-of-thought reasoning on math benchmarks and transfers to other tasks without domain‑specific data, while adding less than 9% computational overhead. GAR outperforms existing baselines such as GRPO on Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-8B models.

By Leqi Zheng, Jinbo Su, Fang Niu, Chaokun Wang, Weiping Wang, Jiajun Zhang, Shannan Yan, Jie Wu, Zhaolu Kang, Rong Fu, Hang Zhang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 12

Reinforcement Learning-based Semi-supervised Knowledge Distillation with LLM-as-a-Judge

arXiv:2604. 02621v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reinforcement Learning (RL) substantially improves the reasoning capabilities of language models, but most existing RL fine-tuning approaches rely entirely on ground-truth verifiable rewards and thus labeled datasets with verifiable answers.

By Yiyang Shen, Lifu Tu, Weiran Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 28

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
Oct 1

Learning Process Rewards via Reasoning State Propagation

The paper introduces Reasoning State Propagation (RSP), a method that models each reasoning prefix with a binary validity state and learns transitions between successive states. RSP predicts break and repair probabilities to connect intermediate reasoning states to the final outcome, enabling outcome supervision to guide learning of earlier steps. Experiments on reasoning search, response selection, and reinforcement learning show RSP consistently outperforms existing Process Reward Models, achieving notable gains over Qwen2.5-Math-PRM.

By Kai Gan, Zi-Hao Zhou, Bo Ye, Jian Zhao, Min-Ling Zhang, Tong Wei