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Related papers: Robust Reward Modeling via Causal Rubrics

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LLMs suffer from critical reasoning issues such as unfaithfulness, bias, and inconsistency, since they lack robust causal underpinnings and may rely on superficial correlations rather than genuine understanding. Successive LRMs have emerged…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-09-23 Zhizhang FU , Guangsheng Bao , Hongbo Zhang , Chenkai Hu , Yue Zhang

The open-ended generation in LLMs usually requires multi-dimensional rubrics to adequately assess quality and guide the improvement of reinforcement learning. However, a critical dilemma inherent in this training paradigm is the imbalanced…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Yu Huang , Zihua Zhao , Zhaoxin Huan , Wanli Gu , Feng Hong , Xinmu Ge , Lin Yuan , Weichang Wu , Qiang Hu , Xiaolu Zhang , Jun Zhou , Jiangchao Yao

Retrieval-augmented large language models, when optimized with outcome-level rewards, can achieve strong answer accuracy on multi-hop questions. However, under noisy retrieval, models frequently suffer from "right-answer-wrong-reason…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-17 Yu Liu , Wenxiao Zhang , Diandian Guo , Cong Cao , Fangfang Yuan , Qiang Sun , Yanbing Liu , Jin B. Hong , Zhiyuan Ma

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is widely used to improve reasoning in large language models, but rewards only final-answer correctness with no supervision over intermediate steps. Rubric-based methods such as Rubrics…

Process reward models (PRMs) have proven effective for test-time scaling of Large Language Models (LLMs) on challenging reasoning tasks. However, reward hacking issues with PRMs limit their successful application in reinforcement…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-10-24 Jie Cheng , Gang Xiong , Ruixi Qiao , Lijun Li , Chao Guo , Junle Wang , Yisheng Lv , Fei-Yue Wang

Reward models (RMs) play a critical role in enhancing the reasoning performance of LLMs. For example, they can provide training signals to finetune LLMs during reinforcement learning (RL) and help select the best answer from multiple…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-06 Qiyuan Liu , Hao Xu , Xuhong Chen , Wei Chen , Yee Whye Teh , Ning Miao

Large language models are increasingly used to support high-stakes decisions, potentially influencing who is granted bail or receives a loan. Naive chain-of-thought sampling can improve average decision accuracy, but has also been shown to…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-16 Zara Hall , Melanie Subbiah , Thomas P Zollo , Kathleen McKeown , Richard Zemel

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in code generation, where the natural language prompt plays a crucial role in conveying user intent to the model. However, prior studies have shown that LLMs are highly…

Software Engineering · Computer Science 2025-12-11 Shuhan Liu , Xing Hu , Kerui Huang , Xiaohu Yang , David Lo , Xin Xia

Reward models have become a staple in modern NLP, serving as not only a scalable text evaluator, but also an indispensable component in many alignment recipes and inference-time algorithms. However, while recent reward models increase…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-22 Zhaofeng Wu , Michihiro Yasunaga , Andrew Cohen , Yoon Kim , Asli Celikyilmaz , Marjan Ghazvininejad

Reward Models (RMs) are critical for improving generation models via Reinforcement Learning (RL), yet the RM scaling paradigm in visual generation remains largely unexplored. It primarily due to fundamental limitations in existing…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-09-11 Jie Wu , Yu Gao , Zilyu Ye , Ming Li , Liang Li , Hanzhong Guo , Jie Liu , Zeyue Xue , Xiaoxia Hou , Wei Liu , Yan Zeng , Weilin Huang

Recent studies on post-training large language models (LLMs) for reasoning through reinforcement learning (RL) typically focus on tasks that can be accurately verified and rewarded, such as solving math problems. In contrast, our research…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-29 Ang Lv , Ruobing Xie , Xingwu Sun , Zhanhui Kang , Rui Yan

Generative Reward Models (GRMs) provide greater flexibility than scalar reward models in capturing human preferences, but their effectiveness is limited by poor reasoning capabilities. This often results in incomplete or overly speculative…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-23 Bin Chen , Xinzge Gao , Chuanrui Hu , Penghang Yu , Hua Zhang , Bing-Kun Bao

Rubrics provide a flexible way to train LLMs on open-ended long-form answers where verifiable rewards are not applicable and human preferences provide coarse signals. Prior work shows that reinforcement learning with rubric-based rewards…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-13 MohammadHossein Rezaei , Robert Vacareanu , Zihao Wang , Clinton Wang , Bing Liu , Yunzhong He , Afra Feyza Akyürek

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) improves final-answer accuracy on reasoning tasks, but it does not reliably improve reasoning quality. Because outcome rewards only assess final answers, they also reward spurious…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-05-19 Chenlu Ye , Zhou Yu , Ziji Zhang , Hao Chen , Narayanan Sadagopan , Jing Huang , Tong Zhang , Anurag Beniwal

Recent RL methods have substantially improved the reasoning abilities of LLMs. Existing reward designs mainly follow two paradigms: (1) Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) derives outcome signals from executable checks or…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-25 Sirui Chen , Lei Xu , Yuying Zhao , Yutian Chen , Yu Wang , Beier Zhu , Hanwang Zhang , Shengjie Zhao , Chaochao Lu

Large language models (LLMs) have exhibited extraordinary performance in a variety of tasks while it remains challenging for them to solve complex multi-step tasks as agents. In practice, agents sensitive to the outcome of certain key steps…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2025-05-28 Zilong Wang , Jingfeng Yang , Sreyashi Nag , Samarth Varshney , Xianfeng Tang , Haoming Jiang , Jingbo Shang , Sheikh Muhammad Sarwar

Reward Models (RMs) are crucial for online alignment of language models (LMs) with human preferences. However, RM-based preference-tuning is vulnerable to reward hacking, whereby LM policies learn undesirable behaviors from flawed RMs. By…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-05 Daniel Fein , Max Lamparth , Violet Xiang , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Nick Haber

Reinforcement learning (RL) has emerged as a promising paradigm for enhancing image editing and text-to-image (T2I) generation. However, current reward models, which act as critics during RL, often suffer from hallucinations and assign…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-03-13 Xiangyu Zhao , Peiyuan Zhang , Junming Lin , Tianhao Liang , Yuchen Duan , Shengyuan Ding , Changyao Tian , Yuhang Zang , Junchi Yan , Xue Yang

The causal capabilities of large language models (LLMs) are a matter of significant debate, with critical implications for the use of LLMs in societally impactful domains such as medicine, science, law, and policy. We conduct a "behavorial"…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2024-08-21 Emre Kıcıman , Robert Ness , Amit Sharma , Chenhao Tan

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) increasingly rely on reasoning traces with complex internal structures. However, existing work lacks a unified answer to three fundamental questions: (1) what defines high-quality reasoning, (2) how to reliably…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-10 Haoran Zhang , Yafu Li , Zhi Wang , Zhilin Wang , Shunkai Zhang , Xiaoye Qu , Yu Cheng