Reinforcement Learning from Meta-Evaluation: Aligning Language Models Without Ground-Truth Labels

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2601.21268v1
• Date: Thu, 29 Jan 2026 05:02:08 GMT
• Title: Reinforcement Learning from Meta-Evaluation: Aligning Language Models Without Ground-Truth Labels
• Authors: Micah Rentschler, Jesse Roberts,
• Abstract summary: Reinforcement Learning from Meta-Evaluation (RLME)<n>We introduce RLME, which optimize a generator using reward derived from an evaluator's answers to natural-language meta-questions.<n>Across a suite of experiments, we show that RLME achieves accuracy and sample efficiency comparable to label-based training.
• Score: 2.757286637005573
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Most reinforcement learning (RL) methods for training large language models (LLMs) require ground-truth labels or task-specific verifiers, limiting scalability when correctness is ambiguous or expensive to obtain. We introduce Reinforcement Learning from Meta-Evaluation (RLME), which optimizes a generator using reward derived from an evaluator's answers to natural-language meta-questions (e.g., "Is the answer correct?" or "Is the reasoning logically consistent?"). RLME treats the evaluator's probability of a positive judgment as a reward and updates the generator via group-relative policy optimization, enabling learning without labels. Across a suite of experiments, we show that RLME achieves accuracy and sample efficiency comparable to label-based training, enables controllable trade-offs among multiple objectives, steers models toward reliable reasoning patterns rather than post-hoc rationalization, and generalizes to open-domain settings where ground-truth labels are unavailable, broadening the domains in which LLMs may be trained with RL.

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