RM-R1: Reward Modeling as Reasoning
Authors: name: Xiusi Chen; name: Gaotang Li; name: Ziqi Wang; name: Bowen Jin; name: Cheng Qian; name: Yu Wang; name: Hongru Wang; name: Yu Zhang; name: Denghui Zhang; name: Tong Zhang; name: Hanghang Tong; name: Heng Ji
Published: 2025-05-05 06:11:12

Abstract: Reward modeling is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with
human preferences, especially through reinforcement learning from human
feedback (RLHF). To provide accurate reward signals, a reward model (RM) should
stimulate deep thinking and conduct interpretable reasoning before assigning a
score or a judgment. However, existing RMs either produce opaque scalar scores
or directly generate the prediction of a preferred answer, making them struggle
to integrate natural language critiques, thus lacking interpretability.
Inspired by recent advances of long chain-of-thought (CoT) on
reasoning-intensive tasks, we hypothesize and validate that integrating
reasoning capabilities into reward modeling significantly enhances RM's
interpretability and performance. In this work, we introduce a new class of
generative reward models -- Reasoning Reward Models (ReasRMs) -- which
formulate reward modeling as a reasoning task. We propose a reasoning-oriented
training pipeline and train a family of ReasRMs, RM-R1. The training consists
of two key stages: (1) distillation of high-quality reasoning chains and (2)
reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards. RM-R1 improves LLM rollouts by
self-generating reasoning traces or chat-specific rubrics and evaluating
candidate responses against them. Empirically, our models achieve
state-of-the-art or near state-of-the-art performance of generative RMs across
multiple comprehensive reward model benchmarks, outperforming much larger
open-weight models (e.g., Llama3.1-405B) and proprietary ones (e.g., GPT-4o) by
up to 13.8%. Beyond final performance, we perform thorough empirical analysis
to understand the key ingredients of successful ReasRM training. To facilitate
future research, we release six ReasRM models along with code and data at
https://github.com/RM-R1-UIUC/RM-R1.