We introduce Function-Room Generation, a new indoor 3D scene generation setting that creates rooms supporting explicit functional goals rather than merely visually plausible layouts. Existing agentic and executable methods improve controllability, but often depend on costly test-time generate--evaluate--revise loops, making functional room generation slow and computationally expensive. We address this challenge with three technical contributions. First, we design a recursive domain-specific language to effectively organize the hierarchical object compositions required by functional rooms, from room structure and major furniture to dense support-surface and nested small objects. It represents rooms as staged executable programs with explicit geometric and functional relations. Second, we propose a sequential feed-forward scene construction framework that distills recursive construction traces into a scene construction expert. At inference time, the expert writes executable DSL code stage by stage, and a deterministic executor directly instantiates each stage without teacher agents, online critics, or iterative repair. Third, we introduce ScenePRM, an execution-grounded process reward framework that improves the expert through reinforcement learning with functional, geometric, relational, and future-constructability feedback. We further establish a function-oriented benchmark and show state-of-the-art performance on both general indoor scene generation and function-room generation, achieving stronger functional completeness, relation correctness, geometric executability, and generation efficiency.
Fine-grained robotic evaluation matters for understanding embodied models, going beyond binary success rates and rule-based process scores. We present PRM-as-a-Judge 1.5, a toolkit for robot process assessment that turns rollout videos into dense progress curves and derives multiple fine metrics. PRM-as-a-Judge 1.5 introduces three metrics, building on version 1.0, that characterize failure-side progress, post-drawdown recovery, and success-side execution quality, helping users understand embodied model capability. Based on the rollout videos from benchmarks, we perform a comprehensive assessment of the embodied models, providing some fine-grained metric results and key findings. We further introduce RoboPulse++ to evaluate the reliability of process reward models (PRM), providing evaluators with a more accurate testing platform. Moreover, we release a user-friendly assessment suite, including the benchmark, metric implementation, and visualization tools, to support reproducible manipulation process evaluation. We call on the community to rethink how robots are evaluated and establish transparent, procedural, and reproducible assessment as a foundation for the next generation of embodied intelligence.
GUI agents powered by vision-language models show strong potential for automating digital tasks, yet frequently fail in long-horizon scenarios due to the absence of step-level verification. Existing process reward models verify actions through textual reasoning alone, missing the visual nature of GUI state changes. We introduce VisCritic, a visual process reward framework that verifies agent actions by directly comparing pre-action and post-action screenshots in visual feature space. VisCritic employs a Siamese vision transformer to extract change-aware representations, coupled with an Action-Aware Critic Head that jointly evaluates action success, task progress, and error type. A critic-training data construction pipeline generates weakly supervised samples from existing trajectories without additional human labels for critic training. Experiments and offline analyses across five benchmarks demonstrate that VisCritic serves as a plug-and-play enhancement for diverse GUI agents, generally improving benchmark metrics while providing visual diagnostic cues.
Reasoning prefixes shape the future trajectory of LLM problem solving, yet existing process reward models usually evaluate them through local step correctness. We argue that correctness is a useful but indirect proxy for the effect we ultimately care about: whether a prefix increases the probability of successful completion. We define this effect as prefix gain, the solve-rate improvement induced by conditioning lightweight student model group on a prefix, and use it to train a Prefix Utility Model (PUM) with a simple pairwise ranking objective. PUM learns outcome-grounded prefix utility and can score both complete trajectories and partial reasoning prefixes. Across Best-of-$N$ selection, beam search, and reinforcement learning on mathematical reasoning, PUM provides a strong prefix-level supervision signal, especially when candidate pools are large, search budgets increase, or rule-based rewards are sparse. We release all data, models, and code at https://zhiqix.github.io/pum-project-page.
Reinforcement Learning (RL) has become a promising approach for improving GUI Agents in long-horizon, stochastic digital environments, but trajectory-level success feedback is too sparse to provide reliable credit assignment for intermediate exploration steps. To mitigate this issue, recent studies introduce Process Reward Models (PRMs), which provide finer-grained training feedback through global milestone verification or local step-level evaluation. However, these methods still suffer from two level-specific limitations: global milestone decomposition is subjective and singular, making it difficult to accommodate the multiple valid execution paths in real GUI tasks, while fixed local judging windows may miss long-range key evidence or dilute the decision signal with irrelevant frames. Inspired by stain-tracing mechanisms in network flow analysis, we propose StainFlow, an entity-stain-flow process reward model for GUI Agents. To reduce the subjectivity of global partitioning, we introduce the Global Entity Stain Tracking module, which extracts visually verifiable task entities and tracks how their stain concentrations and states evolve along the trajectory, allowing task phases to be objectively separated by changes in the entity evidence flow. To improve the accuracy of local verification, we introduce the Local Stain Evidence Linking module. Centered on the triggering entities of each candidate key node, it retrieves relevant steps based on their stain concentrations and state changes, and dynamically constructs high-density evidence windows for verifying true key nodes. Extensive experiments on AndroidWorld and OGRBench show that StainFlow relatively improves online RL success by 3.2% and trajectory completion judgment accuracy by 1.8%.
Large language models excel at complex reasoning, yet evaluating their intermediate steps remains challenging. Although process reward models provide step-wise supervision, they often suffer from a risk compensation effect, where incorrect steps are offset by later correct ones, assigning high rewards to flawed reasoning paths. This issue is further exacerbated in knowledge graph (KG) reasoning, as there may exist multiple paths between the start and end entities in the KGs, and a risky step can make the reasoning path flawed. Those limitations are problematic in risk-sensitive tasks such as medical and legal KG reasoning. To address the issues, we propose a Schema-aware Cumulative Process Reward Model (SCPRM) that evaluates reasoning paths by conditioning on the reasoning prefix , and incorporating schema distance between current reasoning step and the implicit target parsed from the query, which provides cumulative and future rewards to guide the path explorations. We further integrate SCPRM into Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) as SCPRM-MCTS to conduct multi-hop reasoning on KGs for question answering (QA) tasks. Across medical and legal KGQA and CWQ, SCPRM-MCTS improves the performance of Hits@k by an average of 1.18% over strong baselines, demonstrating more accurate and risk-sensitive reasoning evaluation.
Recent advancements in reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) have significantly improved the complex reasoning ability of vision-language models (VLMs). However, its outcome-level supervision is too coarse to diagnose and correct errors within the reasoning chain. To this end, we propose Perceval, a process reward model (PRM) that enables token-level error grounding, which can extract image-related claims from the response and compare them one by one with the visual evidence in the image, ultimately returning claims that contain perceptual errors. Perceval is trained with perception-intensive supervised training data. We then integrate Perceval into the RL training process to train the policy models. Specifically, compared to traditional GRPO, which applies sequence-level advantages, we apply token-level advantages by targeting penalties on hallucinated spans identified by Perceval, thus enabling fine-grained supervision signals. In addition to augmenting the training process, Perceval can also assist VLMs during the inference stage. Using Perceval, we can truncate the erroneous portions of the model's response, and then either have the model regenerate the response directly or induce the model to reflect on its previous output. This process can be repeated multiple times to achieve test-time scaling. Experiments show significant improvements on benchmarks from various domains across multiple reasoning VLMs trained with RL, highlighting the promise of perception-centric supervision as a general-purpose strategy. For test-time scaling, it also demonstrates consistent performance gains over other strategies, such as major voting. Our code and data will be publicly released at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/Perceval.
Diffusion language models generate without a fixed left-to-right order, making token ordering a central algorithmic choice: which tokens should be revealed, retained, revised or verified at each step? Existing systems mainly use random masking or confidence-driven ordering. Random masking creates train--test mismatch, while confidence-only rules are efficient but can be myopic and suppress useful exploration. We introduce DPRM (Doob h-transform Process Reward Model), a plug-in token-ordering module for diffusion language models. DPRM keeps the host architecture, denoising objective and supervision unchanged, and changes only the ordering policy. It starts from confidence-driven progressive ordering and gradually shifts to Doob h transform Process Reward guided ordering through online estimates. We characterize the exact DPRM policy as a reward-tilted Gibbs reveal law, prove O(1/N) convergence of the stagewise Soft-BoN approximation, and show that the online bucketized controller tracks the exact DPRM score at empirical-Bernstein rates. Under tractable optimization assumptions, DPRM also yields a sample-complexity advantage over random and confidence-only ordering. DPRM improves over confidence-based baselines in pretraining, post-training, test-time scaling, and single-cell masked diffusion, with particularly strong gains on harder reasoning subsets. In protein, molecular generation and DNA design, the effect is more multi-objective: ordering-aware variants significantly improve selected structural or fragment-constrained metrics while not uniformly dominating the host baseline on every quality metric. These results identify token ordering as a fundamental control axis in diffusion language models and establish DPRM as a general-purpose module for improving it. Code is available at https://github.com/DakeBU/DPRM-DLLM.