As language models regularly make mistakes when solving math problems, automated identification of errors in the reasoning process becomes increasingly significant for their scalable oversight. In this paper, we introduce ProcessBench for measuring the ability to identify erroneous steps in mathematical reasoning. It consists of 3,400 test cases, primarily focused on competition- and Olympiad-level math problems. Each test case contains a step-by-step solution with error location annotated by human experts. Models are required to identify the earliest step that contains an error, or conclude that all steps are correct. We conduct extensive evaluation on ProcessBench, involving two types of models: process reward models (PRMs) and critic models, where for the latter we prompt general language models to critique each solution step by step. We draw two main observations: (1) Existing PRMs typically fail to generalize to more challenging math problems beyond GSM8K and MATH. They underperform both critic models (i.e., prompted general language models) and our own trained PRM that is straightforwardly fine-tuned on the PRM800K dataset. (2) The best open-source model, QwQ-32B-Preview, has demonstrated the critique capability competitive with the proprietary model GPT-4o, despite that it still lags behind the reasoning-specialized o1-mini. We hope ProcessBench can foster future research in reasoning process assessment, paving the way toward scalable oversight of language models.

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex reasoning through long chain-of-thought, yet they struggle with precise computations and algorithmic operations. Integrating computational tools with LRMs remains challenging, particularly in activating and enhancing models’ tool-use capabilities without compromising their reasoning strengths. We address these challenges through START (Self-taught Reasoner with Tools), introducing two key innovations: (1) Hint-infer, a training-free approach that activates LRMs’ latent tool-use capabilities through artificial hints, enabling test-time performance scaling; (2) Hint-RFT, a self-training framework that enables models to learn effective tool utilization through diverse hint patterns and rejection-based data synthesis. Experiments show that START significantly improves state-of-the-art LRMs across challenging benchmarks, including competition-level mathematics (AMC23: 95.0%, AIME24: 75.6%) and graduate-level science questions (GPQA: 64.6%). Our analysis reveals that START not only enhances accuracy but also improves reasoning efficiency through strategic tool utilization, demonstrating broad applicability in complex reasoning scenarios.

Process Reward Models (PRMs) aim to identify and mitigate intermediate errors in the reasoning processes in mathematical reasoning of Large Language Models (LLMs).However, the development of effective PRMs faces significant challenges, particularly in data annotation and evaluation methodologies.In this paper, through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that commonly used Monte Carlo (MC) estimation-based data synthesis for PRMs typically yields inferior performance and generalization compared to LLM-as-a-judge and human annotation methods.Furthermore, we identify potential biases in conventional Best-of-N (BoN) evaluation strategies for PRMs.To address these challenges, we develop a consensus filtering mechanism that effectively integrates MC estimation with LLM-as-a-judge and advocates a more comprehensive evaluation framework that combines response-level and step-level metrics. Based on the mechanisms, we significantly improve both model performance and data efficiency in the BoN evaluation and the step-wise error identification task.Finally, we release a new state-of-the-art PRM that outperforms existing open-source alternatives and provides practical guidelines for future research.

When using agent-task datasets to enhance agent capabilities for Large Language Models (LLMs), current methodologies often treat all tokens within a sample equally. However, we argue that tokens serving different roles—specifically, reasoning tokens versus boilerplate tokens (e.g., those governing output format)—differ significantly in importance and learning complexity, necessitating their disentanglement and distinct treatment. To address this, we propose a novel Shuffle-Aware Discriminator (SHAD) for adaptive token discrimination. SHAD classifies tokens by exploiting predictability differences observed after shuffling input-output combinations across samples: boilerplate tokens, due to their repetitive nature among samples, maintain predictability, whereas reasoning tokens do not. Using SHAD, we propose the Reasoning-highlighted Fine-Tuning (RFT) method, which adaptively emphasizes reasoning tokens during fine-tuning, yielding notable performance gains over common Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT).

Pretrained language models can be effectively stimulated by textual prompts or demonstrations, especially in low-data scenarios. Recent works have focused on automatically searching discrete or continuous prompts or optimized verbalizers, yet studies for the demonstration are still limited. Concretely, the demonstration examples are crucial for an excellent final performance of prompt-tuning. In this paper, we propose a novel pluggable, extensible, and efficient approach named contrastive demonstration tuning, which is free of demonstration sampling. Furthermore, the proposed approach can be: (i) Plugged into any previous prompt-tuning approaches; (ii) Extended to widespread classification tasks with a large number of categories. Experimental results on 16 datasets illustrate that our method integrated with previous approaches LM-BFF and P-tuning can yield better performance. Code is available in https://github.com/zjunlp/PromptKG/tree/main/research/Demo-Tuning.