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Self-Guided Process Reward Optimization with Redefined Step-wise Advantage for Process Reinforcement Learning

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arxiv 2507.01551 v2 pith:H2Q4RL7C submitted 2025-07-02 cs.LG cs.AIcs.CL

Self-Guided Process Reward Optimization with Redefined Step-wise Advantage for Process Reinforcement Learning

classification cs.LG cs.AIcs.CL
keywords textbfprocesssproadvantagerewardadditionalcomputationaldemonstrate
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Process Reinforcement Learning~(PRL) has demonstrated considerable potential in enhancing the reasoning capabilities of Large Language Models~(LLMs). However, introducing additional process reward models incurs substantial computational overhead, and there is no unified theoretical framework for process-level advantage estimation. To bridge this gap, we propose \textbf{S}elf-Guided \textbf{P}rocess \textbf{R}eward \textbf{O}ptimization~(\textbf{SPRO}), a novel framework that enables process-aware RL through two key innovations: (1) we first theoretically demonstrate that process rewards can be derived intrinsically from the policy model itself, and (2) we introduce well-defined cumulative process rewards and \textbf{M}asked \textbf{S}tep \textbf{A}dvantage (\textbf{MSA}), which facilitates rigorous step-wise action advantage estimation within shared-prompt sampling groups. Our experimental results demonstrate that SPRO outperforms vaniila GRPO with 3.4x higher training efficiency and a 17.5\% test accuracy improvement. Furthermore, SPRO maintains a stable and elevated policy entropy throughout training while reducing the average response length by approximately $1/3$, evidencing sufficient exploration and prevention of reward hacking. Notably, SPRO incurs no additional computational overhead compared to outcome-supervised RL methods such as GRPO, which benefit industrial implementation.

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