PRIME: A Process-Outcome Alignment Benchmark for Verifiable Reasoning in Mathematics and Engineering

ACL ARR 2026 January Submission7867 Authors

Keywords: reward model, RLVR, Reasoning

Abstract: While model-based verifiers are essential for scaling Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR), current outcome-centric verification paradigms primarily focus on the consistency between the final result and the ground truth, often neglecting potential errors in the derivation process. This leads to assigning positive rewards to correct answers produced from incorrect derivations. To bridge this gap, we introduce **PRIME**, a benchmark for evaluating verifiers on **PR**ocess-outcome alignment verification **I**n **M**athematics and **E**ngineering. Curated from a comprehensive collection of college-level STEM problems, **PRIME** comprises 2,530 high-difficulty samples through a consistency-based filtering pipeline. Through extensive evaluation, we find that current verifiers frequently fail to detect derivation flaws. Furthermore, we propose a process-aware RLVR training paradigm utilizing verifiers selected via **PRIME**. This approach substantially outperforms the outcome-only verification baseline, achieving absolute performance gains of **8.29\%**, **9.12\%**, and **7.31\%** on AIME24, AIME25, and Beyond-AIME, respectively, for the Qwen3-14B-Base model. Finally, we demonstrate a strong linear correlation ($R^2 > 0.92$) between verifier accuracy on **PRIME** and RLVR training effectiveness, validating **PRIME** as a reliable predictor for verifier selection.

Paper Type: Long

Research Area: Resources and Evaluation

Research Area Keywords: benchmarking,evaluation methodologies

Contribution Types: Data resources

Languages Studied: English

Submission Number: 7867