Fin-PRM: A Domain-Specialized Process Reward Model for Financial Reasoning in Large Language Models

Abstract

Process Reward Models (PRMs) supervise intermediate reasoning steps in large language models (LLMs), but existing PRMs are mainly trained on general-domain data and struggle with the structured, symbolic, and fact-sensitive nature of financial reasoning. Financial tasks require not only correct final answers but also verifiable intermediate steps grounded in domain knowledge. In this paper, we propose Fin-PRM, a domain-specialized, trajectory-aware PRM for financial reasoning that jointly models step-level correctness and trajectory-level coherence, producing binary supervision signals for both local and global reasoning quality. To support reliable supervision, we construct a high-quality financial reasoning dataset of 3K trajectories, where step- and trajectory-level labels are automatically derived from multi-source reward signals, including Monte Carlo rollouts, LLM-based evaluation, and explicit financial knowledge verification. Fin-PRM defines a unified ranking score that integrates step- and trajectory-level rewards, enabling consistent use across multiple settings. We evaluate Fin-PRM in three scenarios: (1) offline trajectory selection for supervised fine-tuning, (2) reward-guided Best-of-N inference for test-time scaling, and (3) process-aware reward shaping for reinforcement learning. Experiments on financial reasoning benchmarks, including CFLUE and FinQA, show that Fin-PRM consistently outperforms general-purpose PRMs and strong baselines. Our project resources will be available at https://github.com/aliyun/qwen-dianjin.