Results indicate that selective internalization through reward filtering and policy support shaping is effective for open-ended reinforcement learning.
Abstract
Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) for open-ended tasks is challenging because responses must satisfy multidimensional criteria without following a single correct generation trajectory. Existing rubric-based reinforcement learning (RL) methods compress fine-grained criterion-level feedback into scalar rewards, making persistent capability gaps difficult to target under limited on-policy exploration. We propose $\textbf{RISE-RL}$ (Rubric-Informed Selective Exploration), which uses repeatedly missed rubric criteria to elicit privileged trajectories that are difficult to discover through unguided exploration alone. RISE-RL retains only trajectories whose complete-rubric reward exceeds the mean reward of natural rollouts, and then re-evaluates them under the original prompt to emphasize behaviors that remain weakly supported by the natural policy. The resulting guidance signal is optimized through a separate auxiliary objective and removed once its additional benefit diminishes. Experiments with 4B and 14B models across writing, chat, health, and science show that RISE-RL achieves the highest mean score on every evaluated benchmark under guidance-free evaluation. Compared with standard Rubric-RL, it improves the average score by 1.3 points at the 4B scale and $\textbf{3.3 points at the 14B scale}$, including a $\textbf{6.0-point}$ gain on CreativeWriting-V3. It also improves creative-writing diversity and yields gains on objectively scored medical and scientific benchmarks. These results indicate that selective internalization through reward filtering and policy support shaping is effective for open-ended reinforcement learning.
Training open-ended agents via reinforcement learning (RL) is hindered by the lack of verifiable gold answers and scalable rubrics. Moreover, even near the model's capability boundary, long-horizon open-ended agentic tasks often yield brittle and unstable rewards, resulting in weak or noisy rollout contrast that obscures fine-grained optimization signals for group-based policy learning. To address these challenges, we propose ARISE-RL, a novel full-cycle self-evolution framework that couples a task/rubric Generator and a reasoning Solver through rubric-mediated co-evolution. The Generator grounds tool-related rubric criteria in real tool observations and is rewarded for producing valid, intermediate-difficulty tasks aligned with the Solver's evolving capability boundary. The Solver, in turn, learns from fine-grained rubric satisfaction signals through multi-step reasoning and tool use. We further introduce Reward-Gated Self-Evolution Distillation (RG-SED), which selectively distills a memory-augmented variant of the same policy back into itself only when the memory yields empirical reward improvement, thereby reducing distribution mismatch and avoiding blind imitation of noisy guidance. Finally, to support rigorous evaluation, we present ECR-Bench, an expert-calibrated rubric benchmark suite covering single-tool deep research and multi-tool travel planning. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ARISE-RL consistently achieves robust and stable overall state-of-the-art performance across all evaluated benchmarks.
Fanrui Zhang, Ruixue Ding, Qiang Zhang et al.· 0 citations
A Bayesian framework that defines constitutions as prior distributions over evaluation criteria and rubrics as conditional instantiations is introduced, and a taxonomy of rubric-guided RL along the prior-posterior axis is presented, covering constitutional AI, instance-specific rubrics, process-level supervision, self-evolving rubrics, and their agentic and multimodal extensions.
Test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) enables language models to self-evolve at inference time without labeled feedback. Existing methods rely on answer voting and therefore do not extend naturally to open-ended generation, where valid responses cannot be mapped to a shared canonical answer. Without external reward models or stronger judges, adaptation must instead construct reliable rewards from the model's own outputs. We introduce SERPO (Self-Evolving Rubric Policy Optimization), which replaces answer voting with a closed loop that co-evolves response evidence, query-specific rubrics, and policy parameters. Good-Normal-Bad (G-N-B) response evolution organizes maximally separated rollouts into ordered archives; rubric evolution retains criteria that discriminate these archives; probabilistic criterion scoring converts verdict-token likelihoods into reward signals; and policy evolution optimizes the actor with the resulting signals. New actor rollouts then refresh both the archives and rubrics, closing the three-way evolution loop. Across two model configurations, two in-domain benchmarks, and four OOD benchmarks, SERPO improves HealthBench and ResearchQA by up to 20.63 and 20.31 points over the corresponding base models, raises the six-benchmark macro-average by up to 8.06 points, and supports OOD transfer and continued cross-benchmark evolution.
Jianze Wang, Kunwang Zheng, Ying Liu et al.· arXiv.org· 0 citations
It is shown that soft rubric PI provides a larger and more effective training signal on student roll-outs than hard reference completion PI in this regime, and contrary to intuition, soft rubric PI provides a larger and more effective training signal than hard reference completion PI in this regime.
Experiments on challenging reasoning benchmarks show that H$^2$SD achieves the strongest overall performance among representative RLVR and self-distillation baselines, with stable optimization and a favorable accuracy-efficiency trade-off.
Qi Cai, Yi-Chuan Ma, Linyang Li et al.· arXiv.org· 2 citations
Large Language Models demonstrate remarkable proficiency in static reasoning, yet training them as autonomous agents through Reinforcement Learning (RL) for long-horizon tasks is often hindered by severe reward sparsity. While conventional \textit{agent-side warming} up via supervised fine-tuning (SFT) can alleviate this, it is frequently limited by data scarcity and constrained exploration. To address this, we propose a paradigm shift to \textit{environment-side adaptation} by constructing \textbf{F}eedback-\textbf{E}nriched \textbf{E}nvironments (\textbf{FEEs}). Through a pilot study, we establish a feedback design strategy that reformulates environments by transitioning from action guidance to observation enrichment during the later stages of both intra-episode exploration and inter-episode evolution. Large-scale experiments on SciWorld and BFCL benchmarks using various Qwen3 model scales and RL algorithms such as GRPO, GSPO, and DAPO demonstrate that FEEs consistently yield performance improvements over standard settings. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that training with FEEs \textbf{(1)} stabilizes training dynamics by reducing entropy volatility, \textbf{(2)} facilitates proactive state-space exploration in difficult tasks, \textbf{(3) }ensures the internalization of environmental guidance into policy weights rather than acting as a mere inference-time prior, and \textbf{(4) }identifies intra-group feedback consistency as a critical boundary for stable optimization.
