arXiv Computation and Language

Writer-R1: Dynamic Rubric Mining for Reinforcement Learning of Open-Ended Writing

Writer‑R1 is a writing training pipeline that uses Inductive Rubric Generation (IRG) to automatically construct prompt‑specific rubrics for open‑ended writing tasks. The pipeline expands an open writing corpus, applies the generated rubrics during supervised training and reinforcement learning, and provides the rubrics to writers before generation. A compact model, RubricGen‑4B, can supply rubrics for new requests, and Writer‑R1 improves WritingBench and HelloBench scores over 4B and 8B backbones.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 21

Beyond Score Prediction: LLM-Based Essay Scoring and Feedback Generation via Reinforcement Learning with Rubric Rewards

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 Computation and Language
Oct 9

EvoRubric: Self-Evolving Rubric-Driven RL for Open-Ended Generation

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
arXiv AI
Oct 5

OPD Before RL: Warm-Starting Rubric-Based RL with On-Policy Distillation

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 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
Oct 16

Recursive Reward Improvement via Adversarial Meta-Prompt Evolution

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 AI
Aug 12

SKILLER: Language-Level Reinforcement Learning for Reusable Skill Extraction in Small Language Models

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