arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 28

Recursive Self-Improvement via On-Policy Distillation for Reasoning

The paper introduces a recursive self-improvement framework for language models that replaces an external teacher with a frozen copy of the student, enabling dynamic co-evolution (DCE) and self-refined concise learning (SRCL). DCE allows the privileged teacher to evolve alongside the student, while SRCL trains on shorter, verified rewrites to reduce verbosity. Experiments show that the combined DCE+SRCL approach outperforms traditional on‑policy self‑distillation across multiple model sizes and math benchmarks, achieving significant accuracy gains and shorter outputs.

By Shangjian Yin, Zehao Zhao, Kavosh Asadi, Rui Liu, Yuchen Lu, Shike Mei, Hang Cui, Luke Simon, Zhouxing Shi, Hamed Firooz
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