通过前缀值学习,让隐式奖励更精准地指导推理过程。
Unleashing Implicit Rewards: Prefix-Value Learning for Distribution-Level Optimization

- 直接从结果标签学习每个前缀的正确概率,解决训练与推理不一致问题。
- 在ProcessBench上,步骤验证F1显著提升,证明奖励信号更可靠。
- 适合需要高精度推理反馈的在线强化学习场景,如自动推理系统。
过程奖励模型(PRMs)为推理提供细粒度监督,但可靠PRMs通常需步骤标注或复杂验证流程,导致在线强化学习中难以扩展和更新。隐式PRMs通过轨迹级结果标签训练对数似然比奖励,降低了成本。然而,对数似然比在训练中仅作为序列级聚合量,而推理时需分解为令牌或步骤级得分,造成训练-推理不匹配,使局部信用分配模糊,分布级评分可能放大误导优势。本文提出隐式前缀值奖励模型(IPVRM),直接从结果标签学习每个前缀的最终正确概率。步骤信号通过连续前缀值间的时序差分(TD)差值获得,使训练目标与推理使用对齐。IPVRM在ProcessBench上显著提升步骤验证F1。为进一步利用前缀值优化策略,我们引入分布级强化学习(DistRL),将TD优势应用于采样令牌及高概率候选令牌,无需额外采样即可实现密集反事实更新。实验表明,当搭配不可靠的隐式奖励时,DistRL增益有限;但与IPVRM结合后,在下游推理任务中持续提升性能。代码已开源:https://github.com/gaoshiping/IPVRM。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Process reward models (PRMs) provide fine-grained supervision for reasoning, but reliable PRMs often require step annotations or heavy verification pipelines, making them costly to scale and refresh during online RL. Implicit PRMs reduce this cost by training log-likelihood-ratio rewards from trajectory-level outcome labels. However, the log-ratio is constrained only as a sequence-level aggregate during training, while inference decomposes it into token- or step-level scores for partial prefixes. This train-inference mismatch leaves local credits weakly identified, so distribution-wide scoring can amplify misleading advantages. We propose Implicit Prefix-Value Reward Model (IPVRM), which directly learns the probability of eventual correctness for each prefix from outcome labels. Step signals are then obtained as temporal-difference (TD) differences between consecutive prefix values, aligning the training target with inference-time use. IPVRM markedly improves step-verification F1 on ProcessBench. To exploit these prefix values during policy optimization, we further introduce Distribution-Level RL (DistRL), which applies TD advantages to both sampled tokens and high-probability candidate tokens, providing dense counterfactual updates without additional rollouts. Experiments show that DistRL brings limited gains with unreliable implicit rewards, but consistently improves downstream reasoning when paired with IPVRM. The implementation of our method is available at https://github.com/gaoshiping/IPVRM .
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