PRISM: A Unified Framework for Post-Training LLMs Without Verifiable Rewards
On the map: LLM reasoning → Test-time compute and efficient thinking
Abstract (arXiv)
Current techniques for post-training Large Language Models (LLMs) rely either on costly human supervision or on external verifiers to boost performance on tasks such as mathematical reasoning and code generation. However, as LLMs improve their problem-solving, any further improvement will potentially require high-quality solutions to difficult problems that are not available to humans. As a result, learning from unlabeled data is becoming increasingly attractive in the research community. Existing methods extract learning signal from a model's consistency, either by majority voting or by converting the model's internal confidence into reward. Although internal consistency metric such as entropy or self-certainty require no human intervention, as we show in this work, these are unreliable signals for large-scale and long-term training. To address the unreliability, we propose PRISM, a unified training framework that uses a Process Reward Model (PRM) to guide learning alongside model's internal confidence in the absence of ground-truth labels. We show that effectively combining PRM with self-certainty can lead to both stable training and better test-time performance, and also keep the model's internal confidence in check. Code available at https://github.com/ghimiremukesh/PRISM.
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Placed in Test-time compute and efficient thinking, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 20 of its 32 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 8 Jan 2026.
Builds on
20 of 32 references.
Closest ancestors · 2
Same direction, newest first
- 2025Scalable Best-of-N Selection for Large Language Models via Self-Certainty25 Feb
- 2024Scaling LLM Test-Time Compute Optimally can be More Effective than Scaling Model Parameters6 Aug
Other references · 18
- 2022Training language models to follow instructions with human feedbackcited by 15,712
- 2021Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problemscited by 9,743
- 2023Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Modelcited by 7,916
- 2022Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language Modelscited by 5,601
- 2021Measuring Mathematical Problem Solving With the MATH Datasetcited by 5,203
- 2023Let's Verify Step by Stepcited by 3,598
- 2019Fine-Tuning Language Models from Human Preferencescited by 2,124
- 2024LiveCodeBench: Holistic and Contamination Free Evaluation of Large Language Models for Codecited by 1,906
- 2023Is Your Code Generated by ChatGPT Really Correct? Rigorous Evaluation of Large Language Models for Code Generationcited by 1,332
- 2023Math-Shepherd: Verify and Reinforce LLMs Step-by-step without Human Annotationscited by 895
- 2022Solving math word problems with process- and outcome-based feedbackcited by 871
- 2025Learning to Reason without External Rewardscited by 199
6 more
- 2024Free Process Rewards without Process Labelscited by 162
- 2025The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Entropy Minimization in LLM Reasoningcited by 160
- 2025Right Question is Already Half the Answer: Fully Unsupervised LLM Reasoning Incentivizationcited by 124
- 2025SEED-GRPO: Semantic Entropy Enhanced GRPO for Uncertainty-Aware Policy Optimizationcited by 87
- 2025Can Large Reasoning Models Self-Train?cited by 66
- 2024Model-based Preference Optimization in Abstractive Summarization without Human Feedbackcited by 7
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Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.
3 papers.
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- 2025A Model Can Help Itself: Reward-Free Self-Training for LLM Reasoning
- 2024Self-training Large Language Models through Knowledge Detection
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