PRMBench: A Fine-grained and Challenging Benchmark for Process-Level
  Reward Models
Authors: name: Mingyang Song; name: Zhaochen Su; name: Xiaoye Qu; name: Jiawei Zhou; name: Yu Cheng
Published: 2025-01-06 16:31:45

Abstract: Process-level Reward Models (PRMs) are crucial for complex reasoning and
decision-making tasks, where each intermediate step plays an important role in
the reasoning process. Since language models are prone to various types of
errors during the reasoning process, PRMs are required to possess nuanced
capabilities for detecting various implicit error types in real-world
scenarios. However, current benchmarks primarily focus on step correctness,
failing to evaluate PRMs' performance systematically. To address this gap, we
introduce PRMBench, a process-level benchmark specifically designed to assess
the fine-grained error detection capabilities of PRMs. PRMBench comprises 6,216
carefully designed problems and 83,456 step-level labels, evaluating models
across multiple dimensions, including simplicity, soundness, and sensitivity.
In our experiments on 15 models, spanning both open-source PRMs and
closed-source large language models prompted as critic models, we uncover
significant weaknesses in current PRMs. These findings underscore the
challenges inherent in process-level evaluation and highlight key directions
for future research. We hope PRMBench can be a robust bench for advancing
research on PRM evaluation and development.