Improving Value-based Process Verifier via Structural Prior Injection

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Sun, Zetian, Li, Dongfang, Hu, Baotian, Yu, Jun, Zhang, Min
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Sun, Zetian
Li, Dongfang
Hu, Baotian
Yu, Jun
Zhang, Min
author_facet Sun, Zetian
Li, Dongfang
Hu, Baotian
Yu, Jun
Zhang, Min
contents In the Large Language Model(LLM) reasoning scenario, people often estimate state value via Monte Carlo sampling. Though Monte Carlo estimation is an elegant method with less inductive bias, noise and errors are inevitably introduced due to the limited sampling. To handle the problem, we inject the structural prior into the value representation and transfer the scalar value into the expectation of a pre-defined categorical distribution, representing the noise and errors from a distribution perspective. Specifically, by treating the result of Monte Carlo sampling as a single sample from the prior ground-truth Binomial distribution, we quantify the sampling error as the mismatch between posterior estimated distribution and ground-truth distribution, which is thus optimized via distribution selection optimization. We test the performance of value-based process verifiers on Best-of-N task and Beam search task. Compared with the scalar value representation, we show that reasonable structural prior injection induced by different objective functions or optimization methods can improve the performance of value-based process verifiers for about 1$\sim$2 points at little-to-no cost. We also show that under different structural prior, the verifiers' performances vary greatly despite having the same optimal solution, indicating the importance of reasonable structural prior injection.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_17498
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Improving Value-based Process Verifier via Structural Prior Injection
Sun, Zetian
Li, Dongfang
Hu, Baotian
Yu, Jun
Zhang, Min
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
In the Large Language Model(LLM) reasoning scenario, people often estimate state value via Monte Carlo sampling. Though Monte Carlo estimation is an elegant method with less inductive bias, noise and errors are inevitably introduced due to the limited sampling. To handle the problem, we inject the structural prior into the value representation and transfer the scalar value into the expectation of a pre-defined categorical distribution, representing the noise and errors from a distribution perspective. Specifically, by treating the result of Monte Carlo sampling as a single sample from the prior ground-truth Binomial distribution, we quantify the sampling error as the mismatch between posterior estimated distribution and ground-truth distribution, which is thus optimized via distribution selection optimization. We test the performance of value-based process verifiers on Best-of-N task and Beam search task. Compared with the scalar value representation, we show that reasonable structural prior injection induced by different objective functions or optimization methods can improve the performance of value-based process verifiers for about 1$\sim$2 points at little-to-no cost. We also show that under different structural prior, the verifiers' performances vary greatly despite having the same optimal solution, indicating the importance of reasonable structural prior injection.
title Improving Value-based Process Verifier via Structural Prior Injection
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.17498