The paper introduces a two‑stage training framework for rubric‑based reinforcement learning (RL) that first uses rubric‑privileged on‑policy distillation (RP‑OPD) to provide dense token‑level supervision, then applies RL to optimize the rubric reward. In RP‑OPD, a student model learns to match a rubric‑aware teacher’s next‑token distributions on student‑generated prefixes. Experiments on HealthBench, ResearchQA, and RubricHub Science show that this two‑stage approach yields the highest scores and reduces reward hacking compared to a standard SFT + RL baseline.
By Xinpeng Wang, Wei Shi, Yu-Chia Chen, Maria Zontak, Yun He, Richard Yuanzhe Pang
arXiv:2610.02824v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Rubric-based reinforcement learning extends reward-driven optimization to open-ended tasks by assigning partial credit to individual response requireme...
By Yuxuan Fan, Jaehong Yoon
arXiv:2608. 09123v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) for open-ended tasks is challenging because responses must satisfy multidimensional criteria without following a single correct generation trajectory.
By Jinkun Hou, Zhuo Liu, Huimin Ren, Hongsheng Xin, Pan Zhou, Kun Zhan
LLM-as-judge is essential for evaluating open-ended text and steering post-training, yet improving the judge itself typically relies on expensive annotations, reward models, or distillation from stron...
arXiv:2607. 19219v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been widely applied to automated essay scoring (AES) and automated feedback generation (AFG).
By Xuefeng Jin, Jiashuo Zhang, Teng Cao, Bin Yang
The paper identifies a flaw in rubric‑based reinforcement learning where additive reward aggregation allows policies to compensate for missing critical criteria, leading to higher scores but poorer answers, especially in clinical consultation tasks. It demonstrates that grouping rubric criteria into protocol‑level dimensions—so a dimension only counts when all its criteria are satisfied—mitigates this reward hacking. The proposed Protocol‑level Rubrics (ProRubric) improve appropriateness by 10.8 points without sacrificing coverage and achieve the best performance across seven benchmarks.
By Maoqi Liu, Junwei He, Bowen Zhang, Feiran Li, Wentao Ma, Rongyi Lin, Shuhan Zhong, Quan Fang
Large language models (LLMs) have been widely applied to automated essay scoring (AES) and automated feedback generation (AFG). However, existing studies rely primarily on prompt engineering or supervised fine-tuning, while systematic research on reinforcement learning (RL) post-training and automated evaluation of feedback quality remains limited.
arXiv:2608. 02948v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD), where a single model acts as both student and teacher with different contexts, has shown promise in verifiable domains like math, where hard privileged information (PI) in the form of ground-truth answers structurally constrains valid continuations.
By Deepika Bablani, Ajay Gupta, Wanming Chen
arXiv:2606. 03980v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reward models (RMs) provide critical feedback signals for LLM post-training, notably in reinforced fine-tuning (RFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines.
By Tao Chen, Gangwei Jiang, Pengyu Cheng, Siyuan Huang, Yihao Liu, Jingwei Ni, Jiaqi Guo, Mengyu Zhou, Kai Tang, Junling Liu, Qinliang Su, Xiaoxi Jiang, Guanjun Jiang
arXiv:2608.29856v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used as scalable evaluators for open-ended tasks. However, many LLM judges derive query-specific criteria during...
By Yifan Chen, Haitao Li, Qingyao Ai, Fengbin Zhu, Tat-Seng Chua, Min Zhang, Yiqun Liu
arXiv:2608.30005v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Rubric-based reinforcement learning extends RL beyond tasks with exact answers or rule-based verifiers by scoring responses against instance-specific c...
By Fengyu Xie, Yilun Zhao, Bingsen Chen, Arman Cohan, Chen Zhao
Reward models (RMs) provide critical feedback signals for LLM post-training, notably in reinforced fine-tuning (RFT) and reinforcement learning (RL) pipelines. However, current reward evaluation relies on heterogeneous criteria such as rule-based verifiers, ground-truth references, procedural checklists, and complex rubrics, where a unified mechanism to integrate all types of evidence remains unexplored.