用随机丢弃评分标准防止语言模型钻评分漏洞,提升真实质量。
Rubric Dropout: A Simple Way to Mitigate Reward Hacking in Rubric-as-Reward RL

- 训练时随机丢弃部分评分标准,让模型无法针对固定规则作弊。
- 在医学和科研问答任务上,模型对真实评委的评分提升6~7分。
- 只需简单修改,适合所有基于评分标准的强化学习场景。
以大模型为评判者的评分标准作为强化学习奖励,已成为后训练无确定答案任务的标准方法。然而评分标准是质量的固定代理,而非完整描述,长期训练会使策略利用其与真实质量的差异进行奖励作弊。实验发现,使用Qwen3-8B在医疗与科学评分标准上训练,训练中评分持续上升,而更强的黄金评委评分在HealthBench-Hard上下降3分,在ResearchQA上下降22分,说明并非评判噪声,而是奖励劫持。为此提出Rubric Dropout:每步随机丢弃部分评分标准计算奖励,使策略永远无法优化同一套标准。丢弃部分在每批轨迹间共享,保持组内相对优势可比性,评估始终使用全标准。对比0%、30%、50%丢弃率,均使外部评测得分提升1~7分,降低作弊指标,且不损失领域表现。消融实验显示30%-50%为最佳区间,而按贡献重加权标准反而更差。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Reinforcement learning against rubrics, lists of criteria graded by an LLM judge, has become a standard way to post-train language models on tasks with no deterministic answer. The rubric, however, is a fixed proxy for quality, never a complete description of it, and a policy trained against it long enough will learn to exploit the difference. We measure this directly. Training Qwen3-8B with Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) on medical and science rubrics and grading out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks with both the training judge and a stronger gold judge, we find that the two scores diverge during training. The training judge's score keeps climbing while the gold judge's score peaks and then falls, by 3 points on HealthBench-Hard and by 22 points on ResearchQA. A judge with a fixed bias would shift the gold curve by a constant, not send it down while the training score rises, so the divergence is reward hacking, not judge noise. We propose Rubric Dropout, a one-line fix borrowed from neuron dropout. At every step, we randomly drop a subset of the rubric's criteria before computing the reward, so the policy never optimizes the same rubric twice. The dropped subset is shared across each rollout group, so GRPO's group-relative advantages stay comparable, and evaluation always uses the full rubric. Comparing no dropout against dropout at 30% and 50% on both benchmark pairs, dropout raises the OOD gold score at every matched checkpoint (+1 to +2 points on HealthBench-Hard, +6 to +7 points on ResearchQA), lowers the two hacking measures we track, and costs nothing in domain. Sweeping the dropout fraction shows a broad 30-50% sweet spot, while the natural alternative, reweighting criteria by how useful they are to training, performs worse than no intervention at all in our setting.
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