DreamPRM: Domain-Reweighted Process Reward Model for Multimodal Reasoning

TL;DR

DreamPRM introduces a domain-reweighted training framework for multimodal Process Reward Models, enhancing their generalization and reasoning capabilities across diverse multimodal tasks by addressing dataset quality imbalance.

Contribution

It proposes a bi-level optimization approach for training multimodal PRMs that prioritizes high-quality data and improves generalization in multimodal reasoning tasks.

Findings

DreamPRM outperforms existing methods on multiple benchmarks.

Domain reweighting improves PRM accuracy and robustness.

Enhanced generalization across diverse multimodal reasoning tasks.

Abstract

Reasoning has substantially improved the performance of large language models (LLMs) on complicated tasks. Central to the current reasoning studies, Process Reward Models (PRMs) offer a fine-grained evaluation of intermediate reasoning steps and guide the reasoning process. However, extending PRMs to multimodal large language models (MLLMs) introduces challenges. Since multimodal reasoning covers a wider range of tasks compared to text-only scenarios, the resulting distribution shift from the training to testing sets is more severe, leading to greater generalization difficulty. Training a reliable multimodal PRM, therefore, demands large and diverse datasets to ensure sufficient coverage. However, current multimodal reasoning datasets suffer from a marked quality imbalance, which degrades PRM performance and highlights the need for an effective data selection strategy. To address the issues, we introduce DreamPRM, a domain-reweighted training framework for multimodal PRMs which employs bi-level optimization. In the lower-level optimization, DreamPRM performs fine-tuning on multiple datasets with domain weights, allowing the PRM to prioritize high-quality reasoning signals and alleviating the impact of dataset quality imbalance. In the upper-level optimization, the PRM is evaluated on a separate meta-learning dataset; this feedback updates the domain weights through an aggregation loss function, thereby improving the generalization capability of trained PRM. Extensive experiments on multiple multimodal reasoning benchmarks covering both mathematical and general reasoning show that test-time scaling with DreamPRM consistently improves the performance of state-of-the-art MLLMs. Further comparisons reveal that DreamPRM's domain-reweighting strategy surpasses other data selection methods and yields higher accuracy gains than existing test-time scaling approaches.