English

PRISM: A Unified Framework for Post-Training LLMs Without Verifiable Rewards

Computation and Language 2026-01-21 v2

Abstract

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.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.04700,
  title  = {PRISM: A Unified Framework for Post-Training LLMs Without Verifiable Rewards},
  author = {Mukesh Ghimire and Aosong Feng and Liwen You and Youzhi Luo and Fang Liu and Xuan Zhu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.04700},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

Added open-sourced github url

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:55:42.893Z