SibylSense: Adaptive Rubric Learning via Memory Tuning and Adversarial Probing
Organizations: Microsoft · University of California, Los Angeles
Abstract
Designing aligned and robust rewards for open-ended generation remains a key barrier to RL post-training. Rubrics provide structured, interpretable supervision, but scaling rubric construction is difficult: expert rubrics are costly, prompted rubrics are often superficial or inconsistent, and fixed-pool discriminative rubrics can saturate and drift, enabling reward hacking. We present SibylSense, an inference-time learning approach that adapts a frozen rubric generator through a tunable memory bank of validated rubric items. Memory is updated via verifier-based item rewards measured by reference-candidate answer discriminative gaps from a handful of examples. SibylSense alternates memory tuning with a rubric-adversarial policy update that produces rubric-satisfying candidate answers, shrinking discriminative gaps and driving the rubric generator to capture new quality dimensions. Experiments on two open-ended tasks show that SibylSense yields more discriminative rubrics and improves downstream RL performance over static and non-adaptive baselines.
Figures & tables
| Rubric source | RaR-Medicine | GovReport |
|---|---|---|
| Original Rubrics | 49.6 | — |
| Few-shot Rubrics | 51.2 | 48.9 |
| -Base | 56.0 | 52.6 |
| -Adv | 60.6 | 52.9 |
Rubric-Based RL
Rubric-based reinforcement learning uses explicit, often task-specific criteria to reward model behavior beyond simple outcome checks.
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