Related papers: Think-with-Rubrics: From External Evaluator to Int…

Conventional reward modeling relies on gradient descent over neural weights, creating opaque, data-hungry "black boxes." We propose a paradigm shift from implicit to explicit reward parameterization, recasting optimization from continuous…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as intelligent tutoring systems, yet research on optimizing LLMs specifically for educational contexts remains limited. Recent works have proposed reinforcement learning approaches for…

Open-ended generation tasks require outputs to satisfy diverse and often implicit task-specific evaluation rubrics. The sheer number of relevant rubrics leads to prohibitively high verification costs and incomplete assessments of a…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for writing and review support, but their usefulness depends on context-dependent criteria, such as expert preferences or organization-specific conventions, that are often tacit,…

While Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) is effective for deterministically checkable tasks, many vision-language tasks are partially verifiable, demanding multi-criteria supervision (e.g., perceptual details, reasoning…

Open-ended evaluation is essential for deploying large language models in real-world settings. In studying HealthBench, we observe that using the model itself as a grader and generating rubric-based reward signals substantially improves…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as evaluators for natural language generation, applying human-defined rubrics to assess system outputs. However, human rubrics are often static and misaligned with how models internally…

Nowadays, training and evaluating DeepResearch-generated reports remain challenging due to the lack of verifiable reward signals. Accordingly, rubric-based evaluation has become a common practice. However, existing approaches either rely on…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become indispensable for evaluating writing. However, text feedback they provide is often unintelligible, generic, and not specific to user criteria. Inspired by structured rubrics in education and…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has enabled strong post-training gains in domains such as math and coding, though many open-ended settings rely on rubric-based rewards. We study reward hacking in rubric-based RL, where a…

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…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has recently emerged as a promising approach for aligning text-to-image generative models with human preferences. A key challenge, however, lies in designing effective and interpretable rewards. Existing methods…

Reinforcement learning (RL) training of large language models (LLMs) on unverifiable tasks is challenging even when a reasonable-quality reference answer is available. We propose a constrained RL training framework that (i) optimizes a…

Rubric-based text evaluation increasingly uses large language models (LLMs) as scalable judges, but aligning frozen black-box models with human scoring standards remains challenging. We formulate this challenge as a criteria-transfer…

Large reasoning models (LRMs) have recently shown promise in solving complex math problems when optimized with Reinforcement Learning (RL). But conventional approaches rely on outcome-only rewards that provide sparse feedback, resulting in…

Reinforcement learning (RL) has significantly improved the reasoning ability of large language models. However, current reward models underperform in challenging reasoning scenarios and predominant RL training paradigms rely on rule-based…

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…

Automated assessment of open-ended student responses is a critical capability for scaling personalized feedback in education. While large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in grading tasks via in-context learning (ICL), their…

We argue that decomposing reward into weighted, verifiable criteria and using an LLM judge to score them provides a partial-credit optimization signal: instead of a binary outcome or a single holistic score, each response is graded along…

Rubrics and oral feedback are approaches to help students improve performance and meet learning outcomes. However, their effect on the actual improvement achieved is inconclusive. This paper evaluates the effect of rubrics and oral feedback…