arXiv AI By Xinpeng Wang, Wei Shi, Yu-Chia Chen, Maria Zontak, Yun He, Richard Yuanzhe Pang

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

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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.

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