Not Every Rubric Teaches Equally: Policy-Aware Rubric Rewards for RLVR
Summary
This paper introduces POW3R, a policy-aware rubric reward framework for reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR). It shows that static rubric aggregation misallocates learning signal, and POW3R achieves faster convergence and better performance across multiple settings.
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Paper page - Not Every Rubric Teaches Equally: Policy-Aware Rubric Rewards for RLVR
Source: https://huggingface.co/papers/2605.20164 “Not Every Rubric Teaches Equally: Policy-Aware Rubric Rewards for RLVR”
As RL post-training expands beyond fully verifiable domains, rubrics, or checklists, are becoming a common reward interface for open-ended and multimodal tasks.
The question we study is: Should the same rubric weights that define final answer quality also determine what the current policy learns from during RL?
Our finding is no - A criterion can be important for the final response, but if all sampled rollouts pass it or all sampled rollouts fail it, it provides no group-relative learning signal. Across our multimodal setting and HealthBench, roughly half of rubric criteria are non-contrastive for a fresh policy, and static aggregation routes 45–51% of within-category training pressure to such criteria.
In this work, we: • diagnose how static rubric aggregation misallocates learning signal, • show that human importance and policy-dependent usefulness can decouple, and • introduce POW3R, a policy-aware rubric reward framework that preserves the evaluation target while adapting criterion-level reward weights during training.
Across three base policies and multimodal/text-only settings, POW3R wins 24/30 base-policy/metric comparisons and reaches the same plateau in 2.5–4× fewer training steps.
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