arXiv Machine Learning
Rubric Dropout: A Simple Way to Mitigate Reward Hacking in Rubric-Based RL
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arXiv AI
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Rubric Dropout: A Simple Way to Mitigate Reward Hacking in Rubric-as-Reward RL
arXiv:2608. 11669v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reinforcement learning against rubrics, lists of criteria graded by an LLM judge, has become a standard way to post-train language models on tasks with no deterministic answer.
arXiv AI
Oct 1
Scoring Higher, Answering Worse: Mitigating Reward Hacking in Rubric-Based RL via Protocol-Level Rubrics
The paper identifies a flaw in rubric‑based reinforcement learning where additive reward aggregation allows policies to compensate for missing critical criteria, leading to higher scores but poorer answers, especially in clinical consultation tasks. It demonstrates that grouping rubric criteria into protocol‑level dimensions—so a dimension only counts when all its criteria are satisfied—mitigates this reward hacking. The proposed Protocol‑level Rubrics (ProRubric) improve appropriateness by 10.8 points without sacrificing coverage and achieve the best performance across seven benchmarks.
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1
Small Language Models as Judges for Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learning
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...
arXiv AI
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Inducing Reward-Free Judging Rubrics that Reduce Over-Crediting in Agent Evaluation
arXiv:2608. 13564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating language-model agents at scale increasingly relies on a second language model as an automatic judge, because the gold signal, an executable environment reward, is expensive, slow, or unavailable at deployment time.
arXiv AI
Sep 2
CARE: Contrastive Anchor-based Rubric Evolution for Large Language Model Post-Training
arXiv:2609.00892v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rubric-based reinforcement learning decomposes open-ended instructions into prompt-specific, flexible rubrics, making it better suited than reinforceme...
arXiv AI
Aug 5
Rubrics as Privileged Information for Open-Ended Generation
arXiv:2608. 02948v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: On-policy self-distillation (OPSD), where a single model acts as both student and teacher with different contexts, has shown promise in verifiable domains like math, where hard privileged information (PI) in the form of ground-truth answers structurally constrains valid continuations.