A Survey of Process Reward Models: From Outcome Signals to Process Supervisions for Large Language Models

作者：Congmin Zheng, Jiachen Zhu, Z. Y. Ou, Yuxiang Chen, Kangning Zhang, Rong Shan, Zeyu Zheng, Mengyue Yang, Jianghao Lin, Yong Yu, Weinan Zhang · 发表于：arXiv (Cornell University) · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.48550/arxiv.2510.08049 · 被引用次数：1 · 研究领域：Topic Modeling、Artificial Intelligence in Healthcare and Education、Multimodal Machine Learning Applications

Although Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit advanced reasoning ability, conventional alignment remains largely dominated by outcome reward models (ORMs) that judge only final answers. Process Reward Models(PRMs) address this gap by evaluating and guiding reasoning at the step or trajectory level. This survey provides a systematic overview of PRMs through the full loop: how to generate process data, build PRMs, and use PRMs for test-time scaling and reinforcement learning. We summarize applications across math, code, text, multimodal reasoning, robotics, and agents, and review emerging benchmarks. Our goal is to clarify design spaces, reveal open challenges, and guide future research toward fine-grained, robust reasoning alignment.