DuaShepherd: Integrating Stepwise Correctness and Potential Rewards for Mathematical Reasoning

Abstract: In this paper, we propose DuaShepherd, a novel reward modeling framework that integrates two complementary reward signals, correctness and potential, to enhance the mathematical reasoning capabilities of LLMs. While correctness-based signals emphasize identification of stepwise errors, potential-based signals focus on the likelihood of reaching the correct final answer. We developed an automated pipeline for constructing large-scale reward modeling dataset with both signals. A unified, multi-head architecture was explored to train the two reward models in a multi-task setup, demonstrating benefits from learning both correctness and potential in parallel. By combining these two signals into a compound probability, our model achieves consistent performance improvements across multiple benchmarks. Empirical evaluations on MATH500 and ProcessBench confirm that this combined reward significantly outperforms models trained on either reward type alone, achieving state-of-the-art performance under comparable resource constraints.