Congmin Zheng, Jiachen Zhu, Zhuoying Ou, Yuxiang Chen, Kangning Zhang, Rong Shan Shanghai Jiaotong University, Zeyu Zheng Carnegie Mellon University, Mengyue Yang University of Bristol 等 11 位作者
Large Language Models (LLMs) have advanced reasoning ability, yet conventional alignment remains 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.
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cs.CL · cs.CV
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Yunjia Xi Shanghai Jiaotong University, Jianghao Lin Shanghai Jiaotong University, Yongzhao Xiao, Zheli Zhou, Rong Shan Shanghai Jiaotong University, Te Gao, Jiachen Zhu, Weiwen Liu Shanghai Jiao Tong University 等 10 位作者
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) has significantly revolutionized web search. The emergence of LLM-based Search Agents marks a pivotal shift towards deeper, dynamic, autonomous information seeking. These agents can comprehend user intentions and environment context and execute multi-turn retrieval with dynamic planning, extending search capabilities far beyond the web. Leading examples like OpenAI’s Deep Research highlight their potential for deep information mining and real-world applications. This survey provides the first systematic analysis of search agents. We comprehensively analyze and categorize existing works from the perspectives of architecture, optimization, application, and evaluation, ultimately identifying critical open challenges and outlining promising future research directions in this rapidly evolving field.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Jianghao Lin Shanghai Jiaotong University, Yuanyuan Shi Shanghai Jiaotong University, Xin Peng, Renjie Ding LongShine, Hairui Wang, Yuxuan Peng longshine, Bizhe Bai, Weixi Song Westlake University, Zhejiang University and Shanghai Innovation Institute 等 13 位作者
Large language models (LLMs) excel at function calling, but inference scaling has been explored mainly for unstructured generation. We propose an inference-scaling framework for structured outputs that combines fine-grained beam search with ToolPRM, a process reward model scoring each intra-call decision (function name and argument filling). We build the first fine-grained intra-call supervision dataset via function masking, rollout collection, and step-level annotation. ToolPRM outperforms outcome and coarse-grained reward models in predictive accuracy and yields consistent test-time gains on multiple function-calling benchmarks. We further show that structured generation follows “explore more but retain less”, since early JSON errors are unrecoverable.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表