arXiv AI

CARE: Contrastive Anchor-based Rubric Evolution for Large Language Model Post-Training

arXiv AI
Aug 13

Rubric Dropout: A Simple Way to Mitigate Reward Hacking in Rubric-as-Reward RL

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 AI
Aug 17

Inducing Reward-Free Judging Rubrics that Reduce Over-Crediting in Agent Evaluation

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 Machine Learning
Jun 26

Reinforcement Learning without Ground-Truth Solutions can Improve LLMs

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 AI
Aug 26

Contrastive Branch Policy Optimization

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 AI
1d ago

DRACO: Fine-Grained Credit Assignment with Dynamic Rubrics for Long-Horizon Agent Training

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