English

AdaRubric: Task-Adaptive Rubrics for Reliable LLM Agent Evaluation and Reward Learning

Artificial Intelligence 2026-05-12 v3 Computation and Language

Abstract

Evaluating LLM agent trajectories is fundamentally task-specific: a code-debugging agent should be judged on Correctness and Error Handling, not on Fluency or Safety. Yet the dominant paradigm -- LLM-as-Judge with a fixed rubric -- applies the same static dimensions regardless of task, producing systematic mis-evaluation. We present AdaRubric, a framework that (i) adaptively generates task-specific evaluation rubrics from task descriptions via LLM, (ii) evaluates agent trajectories step-by-step with confidence-weighted, per-dimension scoring, and (iii) produces dense reward signals for preference learning. Three composable filtering strategies, including the novel DimensionAwareFilter that provably prevents dimension-level quality masking, yield high-quality DPO preference pairs. On WebArena, ToolBench, and AgentBench, AdaRubric achieves Pearson r = 0.79 human correlation (+0.15 over the strongest baseline), with strong reliability (Krippendorff's alpha = 0.83). DPO models trained on AdaRubric-generated pairs improve task success by +6.8-8.5% over the best baseline. AdaRubric also generalises zero-shot to unseen domains (SWE-bench) and extends to multimodal agents (VisualWebArena, OSWorld) without modification. Our code is available at: github.com/alphadl/AdaRubrics

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.21362,
  title  = {AdaRubric: Task-Adaptive Rubrics for Reliable LLM Agent Evaluation and Reward Learning},
  author = {Liang Ding},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.21362},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

KnowFM @ ACL 2026

R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:32:24.573Z