SCI-PRM: A Tool Aware Process Reward Model for Scientific Reasoning Verification

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 3 Jun 2026] SCI-PRM: A Tool Aware Process Reward Model for Scientific Reasoning Verification Xiangyu Zhao, Hengyuan Zhao, Yiheng Wang, Wanghan Xu, Yuhao Zhou, Qinglong Cao, Zhiwang Zhou, Lei Bai, Wenlong Zhang, Xiao-Ming Wu While Process Reward Models (PRMs) have achieved remarkable success in mathematical reasoning, their application in complex scientific domains-such as biology, chemistry, and physics remains largely unexplored. Scientific problems demand not only logical rigor but also factual consistency and the precise usage of domain-specific tools, areas where current models often suffer from hallucinations and lack of verification. In this paper, we first construct SCIPRM70K, a large-scale dataset featuring Chain-of-Tool trajectories that explicitly interleave reasoning with the execution of scientific tools. Building upon this, we train an efficient reward model called Sci-PRM to provide fine-grained supervision on tool selection, execution accuracy, and result interpretation at each step in one inference. Experiments demonstrate that Sci-PRM significantly enhances foundation models in two key aspects: (1) it enables effective test-time scaling via Best-of-N selection; and (2) when integrated into Reinforcement Learning, it serves as a dense reward signal that mitigates the critical issue of advantage disappearance, allowing the model to break through existing performance ceilings. Comments: Accepted by KDD 2026 AI4Science Track Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) Cite as: arXiv:2606.04579 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2606.04579v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.04579 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Xiangyu Zhao [view email] [v1] Wed, 3 Jun 2026 08:13:27 UTC (559 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-06 Change to browse by: cs References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)