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
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: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
EvoRubric introduces a co‑evolutionary reinforcement learning framework that learns rubric‑driven evaluation criteria for open‑ended text generation. The system uses a shared policy that simultaneously generates responses and rubrics, while a frozen meta‑verifier and grader provide validity checks and scoring. Experiments on medical, writing, and science benchmarks show that EvoRubric outperforms static and other evolving‑rubric baselines, achieving higher average scores on five tasks.
By Xin Guan, Xiaomeng Hu, Shen Huang, Zhenyi Wang, Bo Zhang, Zijian Li, Pengjun Xie, Bo Liu, Jiuxin Cao
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:2601. 03555v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Training reliable tool-augmented agents remains a significant challenge, largely due to the difficulty of credit assignment in multi-step reasoning.
By Yuxuan Jiang, Francis Ferraro
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:2610.17733v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Rubric-based reinforcement learning (RL) evaluates responses against explicit criteria to construct rewards, offering a viable way to train large lan...
By Guangcheng Zhu, Yingfan Ma, Xing Zheng, Haobo Wang, Shenzhi Yang, Kai Tang, Zhengqing Zang, Bowen Song, Weiqiang Wang, Gang Chen
The paper introduces Recursive Reward Improvement (RRI), a method that enhances recursive self‑improvement loops by using an adversary to expose and fix weaknesses in model‑generated rubrics for open‑ended tasks. In RRI, an adversary crafts a rubric‑gaming answer, an honest answer is generated without rubric exposure, and up to two repair steps adjust the rubric so the honest answer scores higher. Experiments on HealthBench Professional show that RRI boosts adjusted scores by up to 12.4 points on a 27B model and yields significant gains on difficult and writing tasks, while also improving performance on unseen benchmarks PRBench Hard and ProfBench.
By Wei Dai, Qianchu Liu, Guanghui Qin, Xing Han, Tristan Naumann, Paul Pu Liang, Sheng Zhang
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
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
arXiv:2608. 10538v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Agent skills represent a standardized format for packaging procedural knowledge and domain expertise, serving within agent harness systems as an essential mechanism to continually constrain a language model's behavior space for repeatable, high-quality task execution.
By Chenhao Dang, Siyuan Xiong, Conghui He, Weijia Li