arXiv Machine Learning

CriPO: Enhancing Rubric-based RL via Self-Distillation

arXiv:2607. 18082v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Rubric-based RL has recently shown promise in improving LLMs on open-ended tasks.

arXiv AI
Sep 4

FlowBalance: Verifier-Grounded Self-Improvement from On-Policy Reasoning Experience

arXiv:2609. 03241v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: A reasoning model can improve from its own on-policy experience, but this inner loop is fragile: terminal verifiers provide reliable yet sparse supervision, while dense same-model guidance can reinforce false confidence or overconcentrate learning on a narrow solution mode.

By Zixun Huang, Kishan Panaganti, Haitao Mi, Leowei Liang
arXiv AI
2d ago

RISED: RubrIcs for agentic multi-environment Selection and sElf-Distillation

RISED introduces a framework that uses rubric-based textual feedback to improve training of a single large language model (LLM) agent across multiple interactive environments. By having an LLM judge tag rollouts with a shared rubric vocabulary, the system guides both online data selection and policy supervision, enabling richer cross‑environment relationships and within‑group reward contrast. Experiments show that RISED achieves the highest mean pass rate and ranks first or second in every individual environment, with rubric analysis revealing behavioural changes behind these gains.

By Jingtan Wang, Sirajul Salekin, Young mok Jung, Javier Movellan, Bryan Kian Hsiang Low, Manjot Bilkhu
arXiv AI
4d ago

SIPO: Unifying Reinforcement Learning with On-Policy Self-Distillation

SIPO (Self‑Instructing Policy Optimization) unifies reinforcement learning with on‑policy self‑distillation by using a contrastive self‑teacher to generate token‑level credit signals. The method samples multiple rollouts per prompt, pairs each with a reference answer and its mistakes, and uses the difference in teacher log‑probabilities to provide dense feedback while still respecting the overall task reward. Experiments on reasoning and code‑generation benchmarks show that SIPO outperforms both RLVR and OPSD baselines without requiring an external teacher or extra generation steps.

By Zhenrui Yue, Huimin Zeng, Yueqi Wang, Yaokun Liu, Fengran Mo, Jinghan Zhang, Mung Yao Jia, Gyuseok Lee, Yang Zhang, Na Wei, Dong Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 5

Rubrics as Privileged Information for Open-Ended Generation

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 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