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Standard reward models typically predict scalar scores that fail to capture the multifaceted nature of response quality in non-verifiable domains, such as creative writing or open-ended instruction following. To address this limitation, we…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Ran Xu , Tianci Liu , Zihan Dong , Tony Yu , Ilgee Hong , Carl Yang , Linjun Zhang , Tao Zhao , Haoyu Wang

Recently, rubrics have been used to guide LLM judges in capturing subjective, nuanced, multi-dimensional human preferences, and have been extended from evaluation to reward signals for reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). However, rubric…

Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate transformative potential, yet their reasoning remains inconsistent and unreliable. Reinforcement learning (RL)-based fine-tuning is a key mechanism for improvement, but its effectiveness is…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-11 Pei-Chi Pan , Yingbin Liang , Sen Lin

This paper investigates the so-called reward-balancing methods, a novel class of algorithms for solving discounted-return reinforcement learning (RL) problems. These methods consist of iteratively adjusting the reward function to transform…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2026-04-23 Simone Baroncini , Bahman Gharesifard , Giuseppe Notarstefano

Reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) often suffers from reward over-optimization, where a policy model hacks the reward signals to achieve high scores while producing low-quality outputs. Our theoretical analysis shows that the key lies in…

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have rapidly advanced from perception tasks to complex multi-step reasoning, yet reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) often leads to spurious reasoning since only the final-answer…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Mengzhao Jia , Zhihan Zhang , Ignacio Cases , Zheyuan Liu , Meng Jiang , Peng Qi

Reinforcement learning fine-tuning has become the dominant approach for aligning diffusion models with human preferences. However, assessing images is intrinsically a multi-dimensional task, and multiple evaluation criteria need to be…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-08 Canyu Zhao , Hao Chen , Yunze Tong , Yu Qiao , Jiacheng Li , Chunhua Shen

We propose FlowRL: matching the full reward distribution via flow balancing instead of maximizing rewards in large language model (LLM) reinforcement learning (RL). Recent advanced reasoning models adopt reward-maximizing methods (\eg, PPO…

Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards has made post-training highly effective when correctness can be checked automatically. However, many important model behaviors require satisfying several qualitative criteria at once.…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Utkarsh Tyagi , Xingang Guo , MohammadHossein Rezaei , Daniel George , Anas Mahmoud , Jackson Lee , Bing Liu , Yunzhong He

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2025-11-26 Xuelu Feng , Yunsheng Li , Ziyu Wan , Zixuan Gao , Junsong Yuan , Dongdong Chen , Chunming Qiao

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a prevailing paradigm for enhancing reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, relying solely on outcome supervision risks reward hacking, where…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Yukun Chen , Jiaming Li , Longze Chen , Ze Gong , Jingpeng Li , Zhen Qin , Hengyu Chang , Ancheng Xu , Zhihao Yang , Hamid Alinejad-Rokny , Qiang Qu , Bo Zheng , Min Yang

Reward modeling is essential for aligning Large Language Models(LLMs) with human preferences, yet conventional reward models suffer from poor interpretability and heavy reliance on costly expert annotations. While recent rubric-based…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-03-10 Dengcan Liu , Fengkai Yang , Xiaohan Wang , Shurui Yan , Jiajun Chai , Jiahao Li , Yikun Ban , Zhendong Mao , Wei Lin , Guojun Yin

Reward modeling lies at the core of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), yet most existing reward models rely on scalar or pairwise judgments that fail to capture the multifaceted nature of human preferences. Recent studies…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-02-04 Tianci Liu , Ran Xu , Tony Yu , Ilgee Hong , Carl Yang , Tuo Zhao , Haoyu Wang

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…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-11-04 Mian Wu , Gavin Zhang , Sewon Min , Sergey Levine , Aviral Kumar

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…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-05-29 Ya-Qi Yu , Hao Wang , Fangyu Hong , Xiangyang Qu , Gaojie Wu , Qiaoyu Luo , Nuo Xu , Huixin Wang , Wuheng Xu , Yongxin Liao , Zihao Chen , Haonan Li , Ziming Li , Dezhi Peng , Minghui Liao , Jihao Wu , Haoyu Ren , Dandan Tu

Reinforcement learning (RL) with outcome-based rewards has proven effective for improving large language models (LLMs) on complex reasoning tasks. However, its success often depends on the base model occasionally sampling correct solutions.…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Jatin Prakash , Anirudh Buvanesh

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

Reward models (RMs) have become essential for aligning large language models (LLMs), serving as scalable proxies for human evaluation in both training and inference. However, existing RMs struggle on knowledge-intensive and long-form tasks,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-30 Ziyou Hu , Zhengliang Shi , Minghang Zhu , Haitao Li , Teng Sun , Pengjie Ren , Suzan Verberne , Zhaochun Ren

A safe and trustworthy use of Large Language Models (LLMs) requires an accurate expression of confidence in their answers. We propose a novel Reinforcement Learning approach that allows to directly fine-tune LLMs to express calibrated…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-03 David Bani-Harouni , Chantal Pellegrini , Paul Stangel , Ege Özsoy , Kamilia Zaripova , Nassir Navab , Matthias Keicher

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by the success of OpenAI's o-series. In RLVR, rewards are derived from verifiable signals-such…

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