LSR-Ben: A Logical and Scientific Reasoning Benchmark for Evaluating Process Reward Models

Abstract

Currently, process reward models (PRMs) have exhibited remarkable potential for test-time scaling. Since large language models (LLMs) regularly generate flawed intermediate reasoning steps when tackling a broad spectrum of reasoning and decision-making tasks, PRMs are required to possess capabilities for detecting process-level errors in real-world scenarios. However, existing benchmarks primarily focus on mathematical reasoning, thereby failing to comprehensively evaluate the error detection ability of PRMs across diverse reasoning scenarios. To mitigate this gap, we introduce LSR-Ben, a process-level benchmark specifically designed for assessing PRM's performance across two primary reasoning domains (scientific and logical reasoning) and nine subdomains. We conduct extensive experiments on a diverse set of 22 models, encompassing both PRMs and LLMs, and derive two key findings: (1) In domains beyond mathematical reasoning, the error-detection ability of existing PRMs and LLMs is found to be markedly weaker by comparison. (2) In general, LLMs exhibit a tendency toward over-identification of errors compared to PRMs, whereas PRMs exhibit an inherent tendency to overlook errors compared to LLMs. We hope LSR-Ben can foster future researches on PRMs for broader domains, thereby enhancing the reasoning capabilities of LLMs.