R-Align: Enhancing Generative Reward Models through Rationale-Centric Meta-Judging

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2602.06763v1
• Date: Fri, 06 Feb 2026 15:17:11 GMT
• Title: R-Align: Enhancing Generative Reward Models through Rationale-Centric Meta-Judging
• Authors: Yanlin Lai, Mitt Huang, Hangyu Guo, Xiangfeng Wang, Haodong Li, Shaoxiong Zhan, Liang Zhao, Chengyuan Yao, Yinmin Zhang, Qi Han, Chun Yuan, Zheng Ge, Xiangyu Zhang, Daxin Jiang,
• Abstract summary: We show that reasoning fidelity is highly predictive of downstream RLHF outcomes, beyond standard label accuracy.<n>We propose Rationale-Centric Alignment, R-Align, which augments training with gold judgments and explicitly supervises rationale alignment.
• Score: 69.96389360650072
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) remains indispensable for aligning large language models (LLMs) in subjective domains. To enhance robustness, recent work shifts toward Generative Reward Models (GenRMs) that generate rationales before predicting preferences. Yet in GenRM training and evaluation, practice remains outcome-label-only, leaving reasoning quality unchecked. We show that reasoning fidelity-the consistency between a GenRM's preference decision and reference decision rationales-is highly predictive of downstream RLHF outcomes, beyond standard label accuracy. Specifically, we repurpose existing reward-model benchmarks to compute Spurious Correctness (S-Corr)-the fraction of label-correct decisions with rationales misaligned with golden judgments. Our empirical evaluation reveals substantial S-Corr even for competitive GenRMs, and higher S-Corr is associated with policy degeneration under optimization. To improve fidelity, we propose Rationale-Centric Alignment, R-Align, which augments training with gold judgments and explicitly supervises rationale alignment. R-Align reduces S-Corr on RM benchmarks and yields consistent gains in actor performance across STEM, coding, instruction following, and general tasks.

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