Improving mathematical reasoning with process supervision
OpenAI just cracked a capability gap. Process supervision beats outcome supervision on math reasoning—and it's an alignment win too.

Why it matters
OpenAI demonstrates a new training methodology (process supervision) that achieves state-of-the-art mathematical reasoning while improving model alignment through step-by-step human validation. This signals a shift in how frontier labs approach both capability scaling and safety.
The key facts
4 to knowNew SOTA achieved in mathematical problem solving
Process supervision (rewarding each correct step) outperforms outcome supervision (rewarding final answer only)
Alignment benefit: model trained to produce human-endorsed chain-of-thought reasoning
Published May 31, 2023 by OpenAI
Go to the source
OpenAI Blogopenai.com
Publisher excerpt: We've trained a model to achieve a new state-of-the-art in mathematical problem solving by rewarding each correct step of reasoning (“process supervision”) instead of simply rewarding the correct final answer (“outcome supervision”). In addition to boosting performance relative to outcome…