Think-RM: Enabling Long-Horizon Reasoning in Generative Reward Models

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) has become a powerful post-training paradigm for aligning large language models with human preferences. A core challenge in RLHF is constructing accurate reward signals, where the conventional Bradley-Terry reward models (BT RMs) often suffer from sensitivity to data size and coverage, as well as vulnerability to reward hacking. Generative reward models (GenRMs) offer a more robust alternative by generating chain-of-thought (CoT) rationales followed by a final verdict. However, existing GenRMs rely on shallow, vertically scaled reasoning, limiting their capacity to handle nuanced or complex tasks. Moreover, their pairwise preference outputs are incompatible with standard RLHF algorithms that require pointwise reward signals. In this work, we introduce Think-RM, a training framework that enables long-horizon reasoning in GenRMs by modeling an internal thinking process. Rather than producing structured, externally provided rationales, Think-RM generates flexible, self-guided reasoning traces that support advanced capabilities such as self-reflection, hypothetical reasoning, and divergent reasoning. To elicit these reasoning abilities, we first warm-up the models by supervised fine-tuning (SFT) over long CoT data. We then further improve the model's long-horizon abilities by rule-based reinforcement learning (RL). In addition, we propose a novel pairwise RLHF pipeline that directly optimizes policies from pairwise comparisons, eliminating the need for pointwise reward conversion. Experiments show that Think-RM outperforms baselines on both in-distribution and out-of-distribution tasks, with particularly strong gains on reasoning-heavy benchmarks: more than 10\% and 5\% on RewardBench's Chat Hard and Reasoning, and 12\% on RM-Bench's Math domain. When combined with our pairwise RLHF pipeline, it demonstrates superior end-policy performance compared to traditional approaches. This depth-oriented approach not only broadens the GenRM design space but also establishes a new paradigm for preference-based policy optimization in RLHF.