arXiv Machine Learning By Bowen Qin, Yi Xie, Yesheng Liu, Xi Yang

ImpossibleRubrics: Stress-Testing Generated Rubrics as Reward Signals

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The paper introduces ImpossibleRubrics, a benchmark of 169 impossible tasks designed to test the robustness of language‑model‑generated rubrics as reward signals. Each task is paired with a verifiable oracle certificate that defines what constitutes an honest answer, and the benchmark includes 48 answerable controls. Experiments show that many rubric generators are exploited frequently—up to 36% on a stress cut—highlighting a significant gap in rubric quality rather than task difficulty, and that generic rubrics can be more vulnerable than tailored ones.

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