ArtiVidRM: Verifiable Artifact-as-Rubric Reward Modeling for Explicit Quality Articulation in Video Generation

Reinforcement learning (RL) is vital for optimizing video generation models, with a robust reward model (RM) serving as the cornerstone. However, existing video reward models often produce unstable scalar scores because they directly map complex, subjective video quality into a single score without explicit evaluation criteria. This leads to scalar drift, where the scoring scale collapses or shifts across different prompts, making the reward unreliable for RL. Drawing inspiration from professional human annotation engineering, we address this problem with RewardVerse, a rubric-based video reward framework that introduces a dynamic rubric as an intermediate representation between the evaluation query and the scorer. Instead of unconstrained direct scoring, RewardVerse first generates explicit evaluation criteria and then performs rubric-guided scoring, providing a stable semantic anchor that mitigates scalar drift. To efficiently optimize this collaborative pipeline, we propose Rubric-Guided Policy Optimization (RGPO), a two-stage training algorithm. RGPO first warms up the scorer using self-evolving seed rubrics and then jointly optimizes the rubric generator to produce query-adaptive evaluation criteria while continuously aligning the scorer with human ratings. Extensive experiments on the 16-dimensional EvalVerse benchmark and external datasets demonstrate that RewardVerse mitigates scalar drift, achieves state-of-the-art performance on both pointwise and pairwise evaluation, and provides a robust and interpretable reward signal for RL in video generation.

Despite rapid advances in photorealistic video generation, real-world applications such as filmmaking require video aesthetics, e.g., harmonious colors and cinematic lighting, beyond visual fidelity. Prior work on visual aesthetics largely focuses on images, often reducing aesthetics to coarse definitions, e.g., visual pleasure, without a rigorous and systematic evaluation. To improve video aesthetics, we propose a hierarchical rubric that decomposes video aesthetics into three core dimensions, Visual Aesthetics (VA), Visual Fidelity (VF), and Visual Plausibility (VP), with 15 fine-grained criteria, e.g., shot composition. This framework enables a large-scale expert-annotated preference dataset and an evaluation benchmark, AesVideo-Bench, containing about 2500 video pairs with expert annotations on VA, VF, and VP. We then build a family of Video Aesthetic Reward Models (AesRM): AesRM-Base, which directly predicts pairwise preferences on these dimensions to provide efficient post-training rewards, and AesRM-CoT, which additionally generates CoT aligned with all 15 criteria to improve assessment interpretability. Specifically, we train AesRM with a three-stage progressive scheme: (1) Atomic Aesthetic Capability Learning, which strengthens AesRM's recognition of fundamental aesthetic concepts, e.g., accurately identifying centered composition; (2) Cold-Start, aligning the model with structured reasoning protocols; and (3) GRPO, further improving evaluation accuracy. To enhance AesRM-CoT, we additionally propose self-consistency-based CoT synthesis to improve CoT quality and design CoT-based process rewards during GRPO. Extensive experiments show AesRM outperforms baselines on multiple aesthetics benchmarks and is more robust, with lower position bias. Finally, we align Wan2.2 with AesRM and observe clear aesthetic gains over existing aesthetic reward models.

Reinforcement learning has gained attention for improving action-conditioned world models (ACWMs), as it enables reward-driven optimization of visual quality (VQ) and action-following fidelity (AF) beyond flow-matching optimization. Realizing this potential requires reward signals that reliably rank videos by both VQ and AF. However, existing rewards capture only one dimension: metric-based rewards assess VQ but require ground-truth videos and do not directly assess AF, while inverse dynamics model (IDM) rewards assess AF without references but do not guarantee VQ. Moreover, IDMs, typically trained on real videos, may provide unreliable rewards for generated videos containing visual artifacts and physical inconsistencies. In this work, we introduce the Action and Video Mismatch Benchmark (AVM-Eval), comprising 67.2k pairs that evaluate how reliably IDMs assess AF on real and generated videos. We then propose ACWM-RM, a reward model that jointly assesses VQ and AF without ground-truth videos during reward computation. To train it, we first construct the Action and Video Mismatch Preference Dataset (AVM-Pref) with 506.3k pairs providing complementary supervision: action-mismatch pairs supervise AF, while video-mismatch pairs supervise VQ and expose the model to generated videos. We then pretrain an action-conditioned predictor on real videos to learn forward dynamics before jointly training it with a patch-weighted score head on AVM-Pref to transfer these dynamics to AF assessment on generated videos. Evaluation on AVM-Eval reveals the limited reliability of IDMs on generated videos, while downstream RL experiments show that ACWM-RM outperforms reward baselines in both criteria.