Rethinking Rubric Generation for Improving LLM Judge and Reward Modeling for Open-ended Tasks

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.05125v1
• Date: Wed, 04 Feb 2026 23:16:09 GMT
• Title: Rethinking Rubric Generation for Improving LLM Judge and Reward Modeling for Open-ended Tasks
• Authors: William F. Shen, Xinchi Qiu, Chenxi Whitehouse, Lisa Alazraki, Shashwat Goel, Francesco Barbieri, Timon Willi, Akhil Mathur, Ilias Leontiadis,
• Abstract summary: We propose RRD, a principled framework for rubric refinement built on a decompose-filter cycle.<n> RRD decomposes coarse rubrics into fine-grained, discriminative criteria, expanding coverage while sharpening separation between responses.<n>It delivers large, consistent gains across both evaluation and training.
• Score: 17.117706938140078
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: 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 generation remains hard to control: rubrics often lack coverage, conflate dimensions, misalign preference direction, and contain redundant or highly correlated criteria, degrading judge accuracy and producing suboptimal rewards during RFT. We propose RRD, a principled framework for rubric refinement built on a recursive decompose-filter cycle. RRD decomposes coarse rubrics into fine-grained, discriminative criteria, expanding coverage while sharpening separation between responses. A complementary filtering mechanism removes misaligned and redundant rubrics, and a correlation-aware weighting scheme prevents over-representing highly correlated criteria, yielding rubric sets that are informative, comprehensive, and non-redundant. Empirically, RRD delivers large, consistent gains across both evaluation and training: it improves preference-judgment accuracy on JudgeBench and PPE for both GPT-4o and Llama3.1-405B judges, achieving top performance in all settings with up to +17.7 points on JudgeBench. When used as the reward source for RFT on WildChat, it yields substantially stronger and more stable learning signals, boosting reward by up to 160% (Qwen3-4B) and 60% (Llama3.1-8B) versus 10-20% for prior rubric baselines, with gains that transfer to HealthBench-Hard and BiGGen Bench. Overall, RRD establishes recursive rubric refinement as a scalable and interpretable foundation for LLM judging and reward modeling in open-ended domains.

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