aiqbench analysis
SERPO advances test-time reinforcement learning by enabling language models to self-evolve rubrics and policies during inference without relying on external judges or labeled feedback. This closed-loop approach effectively addresses the limitations of answer voting in open-ended generation tasks, demonstrating significant performance gains across health and research benchmarks while supporting out-of-domain transfer. The method represents a notable step toward autonomous model adaptation where reward signals are derived entirely from internal response quality rather than static datasets.
SERPO: Self-Evolving Rubric Policy Optimization for Open-Ended Test-Time Reinforcement Learning
arXiv:2607.26873v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) enables language models to self-evolve at inference time without labeled feedback. Existing methods rely on answer voting and therefore do not extend naturally to open-ended generation, where valid responses cannot be mapped to a shared canonical answer. Without external reward models or stronger judges, adaptation must instead construct reliable rewards from the model's own outputs. We introduce SERPO (Self-Evolving Rubric Policy Optimization), which replaces answer voting with a closed loop that co-evolves response evidence, query-specific rubrics, and policy parameters. Good-Normal-Bad (G-N-B) response evolution organizes maximally separated rollouts into ordered archives; rubric evolution retains criteria that discriminate these archives; probabilistic criterion scoring converts verdict-token likelihoods into reward signals; and policy evolution optimizes the actor with the resulting signals. New actor rollouts then refresh both the archives and rubrics, closing the three-way evolution loop. Across two model configurations, two in-domain benchmarks, and four OOD benchmarks, SERPO improves HealthBench and ResearchQA by up to 20.63 and 20.31 points over the corresponding base models, raises the six-benchmark macro-average by up to 8.06 points, and supports OOD transfer and continued cross-benchmark evolution.
Abstract:Test-time reinforcement learning (TTRL) enables language models to self-evolve at inference time without labeled feedback. Existing methods rely on answer voting and therefore do not extend naturally to open-ended generation, where valid responses cannot be mapped to a shared canonical answer. Without external reward models or stronger judges, adaptation must instead construct reliable rewards from the model's own outputs. We introduce SERPO (Self-Evolving Rubric Policy Optimization), which replaces answer voting with a closed loop that co-evolves response evidence, query-specific rubrics, and policy parameters. Good-Normal-Bad (G-N-B) response evolution organizes maximally separated rollouts into ordered archives; rubric evolution retains criteria that discriminate these archives; probabilistic criterion scoring converts verdict-token likelihoods into reward signals; and policy evolution optimizes the actor with the resulting signals. New actor rollouts then refresh both the archives and rubrics, closing the three-way evolution loop. Across two model configurations, two in-domain benchmarks, and four OOD benchmarks, SERPO improves HealthBench and ResearchQA by up to 20.63 and 20.31 points over the corresponding base models, raises the six-benchmark macro-average by up to 8.06 points, and supports OOD transfer and continued cross-benchmark evolution.
Computation and Language (cs.CL)
arXiv:2607.26873 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2607.26873v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.26873 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
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