Better Process Supervision with Bi-directional Rewarding Signals

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04618v1
• Date: Thu, 06 Mar 2025 17:03:17 GMT
• Title: Better Process Supervision with Bi-directional Rewarding Signals
• Authors: Wenxiang Chen, Wei He, Zhiheng Xi, Honglin Guo, Boyang Hong, Jiazheng Zhang, Rui Zheng, Nijun Li, Tao Gui, Yun Li, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang,
• Abstract summary: We introduce BiRM, a novel process supervision model that evaluates correctness of previous steps and also models the probability of future success.<n>We conduct extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning tasks and demonstrate that BiRM provides more precise evaluations of LLM reasoning steps.<n>In search-based strategies, BiRM provides more comprehensive guidance and outperforms ORM by 5.0% and PRM by 3.8% respectively on MATH-500.
• Score: 41.929678717412266
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Process supervision, i.e., evaluating each step, is critical for complex large language model (LLM) reasoning and test-time searching with increased inference compute. Existing approaches, represented by process reward models (PRMs), primarily focus on rewarding signals up to the current step, exhibiting a one-directional nature and lacking a mechanism to model the distance to the final target. To address this problem, we draw inspiration from the A* algorithm, which states that an effective supervisory signal should simultaneously consider the incurred cost and the estimated cost for reaching the target. Building on this key insight, we introduce BiRM, a novel process supervision model that not only evaluates the correctness of previous steps but also models the probability of future success. We conduct extensive experiments on mathematical reasoning tasks and demonstrate that BiRM provides more precise evaluations of LLM reasoning steps, achieving an improvement of 3.1% on Gaokao2023 over PRM under the Best-of-N sampling method. Besides, in search-based strategies, BiRM provides more comprehensive guidance and outperforms ORM by 5.0% and PRM by 3.8% respectively on MATH-500.

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