arXiv:2608. 11669v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning against rubrics, lists of criteria graded by an LLM judge, has become a standard way to post-train language models on tasks with no deterministic answer.
By Minglai Yang, Xinyu Guo, Utkarsh Tyagi, Mian Zhang, Razvan Dumitru, Sunjie Hou, Yunzhong He, Daniel Yue Zhang, Ying Liu
arXiv:2608. 13564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating language-model agents at scale increasingly relies on a second language model as an automatic judge, because the gold signal, an executable environment reward, is expensive, slow, or unavailable at deployment time.
By Darragh Quinn, David Dylan, Roisin Healy, Fionn Carroll, Maeve Donnelly, Cormac Sheehan
arXiv:2607. 18082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rubric-based RL has recently shown promise in improving LLMs on open-ended tasks.
By Mingxuan Xia, Yuhang Yang, Chao Ye, Shuai Zhu, Shenzhi Yang, Guangcheng Zhu, Yuhang Zhang, Cheng Peng, Haobo Wang, Siqing Wang
arXiv:2607. 18082v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Rubric-based RL has recently shown promise in improving LLMs on open-ended tasks.
By Mingxuan Xia, Yuhang Yang, Chao Ye, Shuai Zhu, Shenzhi Yang, Guangcheng Zhu, Yuhang Zhang, Cheng Peng, Haobo Wang, Siqing Wang
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
arXiv:2606. 27369v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) for training LLMs typically rely on ground-truth answers to assign rewards, limiting their applicability to tasks where the ground-truth solution is unknown.
By Yingyu Lin, Qiyue Gao, Nikki Lijing Kuang, Xunpeng Huang, Kun Zhou, Tongtong Liang, Zhewei Yao, Yi-An Ma, Yuxiong He
arXiv:2608. 16156v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Long-horizon large language model (LLM) agents are typically optimized with sparse terminal outcomes, making fine-grained credit assignment across multi-step interactions difficult.
By Huan Zhang, Mingju Chen, Dongxu Zhou, Can Lv, Heng Chang, Sen Cui, Faguo Wu, Shiji Zhou
Contrastive Branch Policy Optimization (CBPO) is a reinforcement learning method that separates the allocation of a fixed rollout budget from the translation of branch outcomes into token-level credit. It uses generation entropy to screen branch positions, path- and node-level decay to distribute the budget, and Contrastive Branch Value (CBV) to estimate local decision sensitivity without changing reward signs. CBPO partitions trajectories into non-overlapping credit segments, preventing duplicated gradients and enabling fine-grained credit assignment using only outcome rewards.
By Ying Wang, Changlin Qiu, Bang Lin, Linbo Jin, Wen Jiang, Zhe Sun, Jingli Yang
arXiv:2606. 03361v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rubric-based rewards are increasingly used for open-ended language model post-training, but criterion-level scores are often aggregated as independent utilities.
By Can Lv, Mingju Chen, Heng Chang, Shiji Zhou
DRACO introduces a method for fine‑grained credit assignment in long‑horizon reinforcement learning tasks that lack verifiable rewards. It dynamically generates multi‑criteria rubrics during training, scores them once per trajectory, and redistributes the resulting judgment over the steps responsible for each rubric to produce differentiated per‑step advantages. Experiments on AppWorld and Tau‑Bench show significant performance gains over baseline models and other rubric‑based approaches, even without using any verifiers.
By Shubham Gandhi, Saurabh Goyal, Kiran Kate, Yara Rizk
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
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...