arXiv AI By Mingxuan Xia, Yuhang Yang, Chao Ye, Shuai Zhu, Shenzhi Yang, Guangcheng Zhu, Yuhang Zhang, Cheng Peng, Haobo Wang, Siqing Wang

Enhancing Rubric-based RL via Self-Distillation

Read the original on arXiv AI →

arXiv:2607. 18082v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Rubric-based RL has recently shown promise in improving LLMs on open-ended tasks.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

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
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
Oct 2

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