ProJudge: A Multi-Modal Multi-Discipline Benchmark and Instruction-Tuning Dataset for MLLM-based Process Judges

As multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) frequently exhibit errors when solving scientific problems, evaluating the validity of their reasoning processes is critical for ensuring reliability and uncovering fine-grained model weaknesses. Since human evaluation is laborious and costly, prompting MLLMs as automated process judges has become a common practice. However, the reliability of these model-based judges remains uncertain. To address this, we introduce ProJudgeBench, the first comprehensive benchmark specifically designed for evaluating abilities of MLLM-based process judges. ProJudgeBench comprises 2,400 test cases and 50,118 step-level labels, spanning four scientific disciplines with diverse difficulty levels and multi-modal content. In ProJudgeBench, each step is meticulously annotated by human experts for correctness, error type, and explanation, enabling a systematic evaluation of judges' capabilities to detect, classify and diagnose errors. Evaluation on ProJudgeBench reveals a significant performance gap between open-source and proprietary models. To bridge this gap, we further propose ProJudge-173k, a large-scale instruction-tuning dataset, and a Dynamic Dual-Phase fine-tuning strategy that encourages models to explicitly reason through problem-solving before assessing solutions. Both contributions significantly enhance the process evaluation capabilities of open-source models. All the resources will be released to foster future research of reliable multi-modal process evaluation.

@article{ai2025_2503.06553,
  title={ ProJudge: A Multi-Modal Multi-Discipline Benchmark and Instruction-Tuning Dataset for MLLM-based Process Judges },
  author={ Jiaxin Ai and Pengfei Zhou and Zhaopan Xu and Ming Li and Fanrui Zhang and Zizhen Li and Jianwen Sun and Yukang Feng and Baojin Huang and Zhongyuan Wang and Kaipeng Zhang },
  journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.06553},
  year={ 2025 }
}