AICLMay 29, 2025

Socratic-PRMBench: Benchmarking Process Reward Models with Systematic Reasoning Patterns

arXiv:2505.23474v13 citationsh-index: 30
Originality Synthesis-oriented
AI Analysis

This provides a comprehensive testbed for evaluating PRMs in complex reasoning tasks, though it is incremental as it builds on existing benchmarking efforts.

The paper tackles the problem that existing benchmarks for Process Reward Models (PRMs) lack systematic evaluation under various reasoning patterns, by introducing Socratic-PRMBench, a new benchmark with 2995 flawed reasoning paths across six patterns, which reveals significant deficiencies in current PRMs.

Process Reward Models (PRMs) are crucial in complex reasoning and problem-solving tasks (e.g., LLM agents with long-horizon decision-making) by verifying the correctness of each intermediate reasoning step. In real-world scenarios, LLMs may apply various reasoning patterns (e.g., decomposition) to solve a problem, potentially suffering from errors under various reasoning patterns. Therefore, PRMs are required to identify errors under various reasoning patterns during the reasoning process. However, existing benchmarks mainly focus on evaluating PRMs with stepwise correctness, ignoring a systematic evaluation of PRMs under various reasoning patterns. To mitigate this gap, we introduce Socratic-PRMBench, a new benchmark to evaluate PRMs systematically under six reasoning patterns, including Transformation, Decomposition, Regather, Deduction, Verification, and Integration. Socratic-PRMBench}comprises 2995 reasoning paths with flaws within the aforementioned six reasoning patterns. Through our experiments on both PRMs and LLMs prompted as critic models, we identify notable deficiencies in existing PRMs. These observations underscore the significant weakness of current PRMs in conducting evaluations on reasoning steps under various reasoning patterns. We hope Socratic-PRMBench can serve as a comprehensive testbed for systematic evaluation of PRMs under diverse reasoning patterns and pave the way for future development of PRMs.

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