Uncertainty-Based Methods for Automated Process Reward Data Construction and Output Aggregation in Mathematical Reasoning

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Main Authors: Han, Jiuzhou, Buntine, Wray, Shareghi, Ehsan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Han, Jiuzhou
Buntine, Wray
Shareghi, Ehsan
author_facet Han, Jiuzhou
Buntine, Wray
Shareghi, Ehsan
contents Large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex mathematical reasoning tasks, but they inevitably generate errors throughout multi-step solutions. Process-level Reward Models (PRMs) have shown great promise by providing supervision and evaluation at each intermediate step, thereby effectively improving the models' reasoning abilities. However, training effective PRMs requires high-quality process reward data, yet existing methods for constructing such data are often labour-intensive or inefficient. In this paper, we propose an uncertainty-driven framework for automated process reward data construction, encompassing both data generation and annotation processes for PRMs. Additionally, we identify the limitations of both majority vote and PRMs, and introduce two generic uncertainty-aware output aggregation methods: Hybrid Majority Reward Vote and Weighted Reward Frequency Vote, which combine the strengths of majority vote with PRMs. Extensive experiments on ProcessBench, MATH, and GSMPlus show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed PRM data construction framework, and demonstrate that the two output aggregation methods further improve the mathematical reasoning abilities across diverse PRMs. The code and data will be publicly available at https://github.com/Jiuzhouh/UnPRM.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_01773
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Uncertainty-Based Methods for Automated Process Reward Data Construction and Output Aggregation in Mathematical Reasoning
Han, Jiuzhou
Buntine, Wray
Shareghi, Ehsan
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Large language models have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in complex mathematical reasoning tasks, but they inevitably generate errors throughout multi-step solutions. Process-level Reward Models (PRMs) have shown great promise by providing supervision and evaluation at each intermediate step, thereby effectively improving the models' reasoning abilities. However, training effective PRMs requires high-quality process reward data, yet existing methods for constructing such data are often labour-intensive or inefficient. In this paper, we propose an uncertainty-driven framework for automated process reward data construction, encompassing both data generation and annotation processes for PRMs. Additionally, we identify the limitations of both majority vote and PRMs, and introduce two generic uncertainty-aware output aggregation methods: Hybrid Majority Reward Vote and Weighted Reward Frequency Vote, which combine the strengths of majority vote with PRMs. Extensive experiments on ProcessBench, MATH, and GSMPlus show the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed PRM data construction framework, and demonstrate that the two output aggregation methods further improve the mathematical reasoning abilities across diverse PRMs. The code and data will be publicly available at https://github.com/Jiuzhouh/UnPRM.
title Uncertainty-Based Methods for Automated Process Reward Data Construction and Output Aggregation in Mathematical Reasoning
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01773