arXiv:2602.13551v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Reward models (RMs) play a central role throughout the language model (LM) pipeline, particularly in non-verifiable domains. However, the dominant...
By Yike Wang, Faeze Brahman, Shangbin Feng, Teng Xiao, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, Yulia Tsvetkov
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...
By Salman Rahman, Sruthi Gorantla, Arpit Gupta, Swastik Roy, Nanyun Peng, Yang Liu
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
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
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (e. g.
R3 is a new reward modeling framework that addresses limitations in current reward models by being rubric‑agnostic and generalizable across multiple evaluation dimensions. It provides interpretable, reasoned score assignments rather than opaque scalar outputs, enhancing transparency and flexibility in evaluating language models. The authors release their models, data, and code openly at https://github.com/rubricreward/r3.
By David Anugraha, Zilu Tang, Lester James V. Miranda, Hanyang Zhao, Mohammad Rifqi Farhansyah, Garry Kuwanto, Derry Wijaya, Genta Indra Winata