arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Neuro-symbolic PRM: Enhancing Scientific Reasoning via Structured Traces and Symbolic Verification

The paper introduces a neuro‑symbolic framework for scientific reasoning that separates symbolic validity and semantic groundedness. A deterministic symbolic verifier acts as a hard filter to guarantee syntactic and arithmetic correctness, while a Process Reward Model (PRM) is trained on verifier‑accepted steps to assess contextual grounding. The authors propose Counterfactual Symbolic Perturbation (CSP) to generate hard negative examples that pass the verifier but are logically flawed, enabling efficient PRM training and a verifier‑first constrained search at inference.

By Yuxin Zi, Cong Xu, Suparna Bhattacharya, Martin Foltin, Amit Sheth