Rubric-based evaluation of large language models (LLMs) often assigns binary judgments to multiple criteria, but the certainty of these judgments varies widely. Existing aggregation methods treat all criteria as equally certain, potentially misleading reinforcement learning signals. The authors propose Uncertainty-aware Rubric Weighting (URW), a training-free framework that uses conformal calibration to quantify and weight criterion-level uncertainty, improving preference accuracy and downstream RL alignment.
By Licheng Pan, Haocheng Yang, Haoxuan Li, Yuzhou Chen, Yichen Sun, Yuan Lu, Xiaoxi Li, Hao Wang, Zhixuan Chu, Kui Ren
arXiv:2409.00696v4 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Rating-based human evaluation has become an essential tool to accurately evaluate the impressive performance of large language models (LLMs)....
By Jasper Dekoninck, Maximilian Baader, Martin Vechev
Reliable reward and preference signals are critical for evaluating and optimizing large language models on open-ended tasks. Rubric-based judges offer a transparent way to decompose such judgments into explicit evaluation criteria, but existing annotation-free rubric generators typically rely on a single generic evaluator.
arXiv:2607. 01830v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Reliable reward and preference signals are critical for evaluating and optimizing large language models on open-ended tasks.
By Dazhi Fu, Jiuding Yang, Yiwen Guo, Jicong Fan
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:2607. 28282v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Evaluating the quality and relevance of textual outputs from Large Language Models (LLMs) remains challenging and resource-intensive.
By Bertil Braun, Martin Forell
The paper reproduces five factuality alignment methods for large language models—three on‑policy RL approaches (PPO, GRPO, Dr.GRPO) and two offline preference optimization methods (DPO, KTO)—using a common benchmark and evaluation metrics. None of the methods consistently outperforms the base model, and the rewards appear to favor format, length, or brevity rather than factuality or relevance. The study also highlights problems with current evaluation practices, noting that metrics and benchmarks often fail to measure prompt relevance and rely on fragile LLM judges and retrieval for verification.
arXiv:2607. 25069v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated verification of numerical claims is a challenging problem, as it requires both language understanding and quantitative reasoning.
By Sagnik Sinha, Shreyas Shrestha
PADM'E is a method for synthesizing preference‑aligned data to meta‑evaluate language‑model (LM) evaluators of agentic behaviors. It reframes meta‑evaluation as a preference judgment problem, generating criterion‑based data with small LMs and no human involvement. In a prototype, PADM'E produced 1,000 samples across four domains and three criteria, and human validation showed agreement with human judgment rising from 73% to 85% compared to a naive baseline.
By Cheng Chang, Yining Mao, Peng Qi
arXiv:2602.02219v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large language models are widely employed as evaluators, a paradigm commonly referred to as LLM-as-a-judge. Prior research has predominantly examin...
By Yuzheng Xu, Tosho Hirasawa, Tadashi Kozuno, Yoshitaka Ushiku
arXiv:2610.18415v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are aligned to human preferences, after pre-training and supervised fine-tuning steps. However, standard RL alignment st...
By Pratuat Amatya, Vinay Setty, V Venktesh, Avishek Anand
arXiv:2604. 07343v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pluralistic alignment has emerged as a critical frontier in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), with reward models (RMs) serving as a central mechanism for capturing diverse human values.
By Qiyao Ma, Dechen Gao, Rui Cai, Boqi Zhao, Hanchu Zhou, Junshan Zhang, Zhe Zhao