Daily Papers

The rapid expansion of scholarly literature presents significant challenges in synthesizing comprehensive, high-quality academic surveys. Recent advancements in agentic systems offer considerable promise for automating tasks that traditionally require human expertise, including literature review, synthesis, and iterative refinement. However, existing automated survey-generation solutions often suffer from inadequate quality control, poor formatting, and limited adaptability to iterative feedback, which are core elements intrinsic to scholarly writing. To address these limitations, we introduce ARISE, an Agentic Rubric-guided Iterative Survey Engine designed for automated generation and continuous refinement of academic survey papers. ARISE employs a modular architecture composed of specialized large language model agents, each mirroring distinct scholarly roles such as topic expansion, citation curation, literature summarization, manuscript drafting, and peer-review-based evaluation. Central to ARISE is a rubric-guided iterative refinement loop in which multiple reviewer agents independently assess manuscript drafts using a structured, behaviorally anchored rubric, systematically enhancing the content through synthesized feedback. Evaluating ARISE against state-of-the-art automated systems and recent human-written surveys, our experimental results demonstrate superior performance, achieving an average rubric-aligned quality score of 92.48. ARISE consistently surpasses baseline methods across metrics of comprehensiveness, accuracy, formatting, and overall scholarly rigor. All code, evaluation rubrics, and generated outputs are provided openly at https://github.com/ziwang11112/ARISE

As web platforms evolve towards greater personalization and emotional complexity, conversational agents must transcend superficial empathy to demonstrate identity-aware emotional reasoning. However, existing systems face two limitations: (1) reliance on situation-centric datasets lacking persistent user identity, which hampers the capture of personalized affective nuances; and (2) dependence on opaque, coarse reward signals that hinder development of verifiable empathetic reasoning. To address these gaps, we introduce KardiaBench, a large-scale user-grounded benchmark comprising 178,080 QA pairs across 22,080 multi-turn conversations anchored to 671 real-world profiles. The dataset is constructed via a model-in-the-loop pipeline with iterative rubric-guided refinement to ensure psychological plausibility and persona consistency. This progressive empathy pipeline that integrates user comprehension, contextual reasoning, and emotion perception into conversations, followed by iterative critique and rubric-based refinement to ensure psychological plausibility, emotional fidelity, and persona consistency. Building on this, we propose Kardia-R1, a framework that trains models for interpretable, stepwise empathetic cognition. Kardia-R1 leverages Rubric-as-Judge Empathetic Reinforcement Learning (Rubric-ERL), a GRPO-based method that uses explainable, human-aligned rubric rewards to tightly couple user understanding, emotional inference, and supportive response generation. Extensive experiments across four LLM backbones demonstrate that Kardia-R1 consistently outperforms othet methods in emotion accuracy, empathy, relevance, persona consistency, and safety. Our dataset and model will be released at https://github.com/JhCircle/Kardia-R1.

Recent advances in Deep Research Agents (DRAs) are transforming automated knowledge discovery and problem-solving. While the majority of existing efforts focus on enhancing policy capabilities via post-training, we propose an alternative paradigm: self-evolving the agent's ability by iteratively verifying the policy model's outputs, guided by meticulously crafted rubrics. This approach gives rise to the inference-time scaling of verification, wherein an agent self-improves by evaluating its generated answers to produce iterative feedback and refinements. We derive the rubrics based on an automatically constructed DRA Failure Taxonomy, which systematically classifies agent failures into five major categories and thirteen sub-categories. We present DeepVerifier, a rubrics-based outcome reward verifier that leverages the asymmetry of verification and outperforms vanilla agent-as-judge and LLM judge baselines by 12%-48% in meta-evaluation F1 score. To enable practical self-evolution, DeepVerifier integrates as a plug-and-play module during test-time inference. The verifier produces detailed rubric-based feedback, which is fed back to the agent for iterative bootstrapping, refining responses without additional training. This test-time scaling delivers 8%-11% accuracy gains on challenging subsets of GAIA and XBench-DeepResearch when powered by capable closed-source LLMs. Finally, to support open-source advancement, we release DeepVerifier-4K, a curated supervised fine-tuning dataset of 4,646 high-quality agent steps focused on DRA verification. These examples emphasize reflection and self-critique, enabling open models to develop robust verification capabilities.

Iterative refinement has been a promising paradigm to enable large language models (LLMs) to resolve difficult reasoning and problem-solving tasks. One of the key challenges, however, is how to effectively search through the enormous search space of possible refinements. Existing methods typically fall back on predefined heuristics, which are troubled by the exploration-exploitation dilemma and cannot adapt based on past refinement outcomes. We introduce Tree-Guided Policy Refinement (TGPR), a novel framework that combines GRPO with a Thompson-Sampling-based tree search. TGPR explores both failed and successful refinement paths actively, with denser training trajectories and more adaptive policies. On HumanEval, MBPP, and APPS benchmarks, our method achieves up to +4.2 percentage points absolute improvement in pass@1 (on MBPP) and up to +12.51 percentage points absolute improvement in pass@10 (on APPS) compared to a competitive GRPO baseline. Apart from debugging code, TGPR focuses on a principled approach to combining learned policies with structured search methods, offering a general framework for enhancing iterative refinement and stateful reasoning in LLMs.

We propose a framework that amortizes the cost of inference-time reasoning by converting transient critiques into retrievable guidelines, through a file-based memory system and agent-controlled tool calls. We evaluate this method on the Rubric Feedback Bench, a novel dataset for rubric-based learning. Experiments demonstrate that our augmented LLMs rapidly match the performance of test-time refinement pipelines while drastically reducing inference cost.

With the development of large language models, their ability to follow simple instructions has significantly improved. However, adhering to complex instructions remains a major challenge. Current approaches to generating complex instructions are often irrelevant to the current instruction requirements or suffer from limited scalability and diversity. Moreover, methods such as back-translation, while effective for simple instruction generation, fail to leverage the rich contents and structures in large web corpora. In this paper, we propose a novel automatic iterative refinement framework to generate complex instructions with constraints, which not only better reflects the requirements of real scenarios but also significantly enhances LLMs' ability to follow complex instructions. The AIR framework consists of two stages: (1)Generate an initial instruction from a document; (2)Iteratively refine instructions with LLM-as-judge guidance by comparing the model's output with the document to incorporate valuable constraints. Finally, we construct the AIR-10K dataset with 10K complex instructions and demonstrate that instructions generated with our approach significantly improve the model's ability to follow complex instructions, outperforming existing methods for instruction generation.

Text-to-image (T2I) models have achieved remarkable progress, yet they continue to struggle with complex prompts that require simultaneously handling multiple objects, relations, and attributes. Existing inference-time strategies, such as parallel sampling with verifiers or simply increasing denoising steps, can improve prompt alignment but remain inadequate for richly compositional settings where many constraints must be satisfied. Inspired by the success of chain-of-thought reasoning in large language models, we propose an iterative test-time strategy in which a T2I model progressively refines its generations across multiple steps, guided by feedback from a vision-language model as the critic in the loop. Our approach is simple, requires no external tools or priors, and can be flexibly applied to a wide range of image generators and vision-language models. Empirically, we demonstrate consistent gains on image generation across benchmarks: a 16.9% improvement in all-correct rate on ConceptMix (k=7), a 13.8% improvement on T2I-CompBench (3D-Spatial category) and a 12.5% improvement on Visual Jenga scene decomposition compared to compute-matched parallel sampling. Beyond quantitative gains, iterative refinement produces more faithful generations by decomposing complex prompts into sequential corrections, with human evaluators preferring our method 58.7% of the time over 41.3% for the parallel baseline. Together, these findings highlight iterative self-correction as a broadly applicable principle for compositional image generation. Results and visualizations are available at https://iterative-img-gen.github.io/

We study professional image generation, where a model must synthesize information-dense, scientifically precise illustrations from technical descriptions rather than merely produce visually plausible pictures. To quantify the progress, we introduce ProImage-Bench, a rubric-based benchmark that targets biology schematics, engineering/patent drawings, and general scientific diagrams. For 654 figures collected from real textbooks and technical reports, we construct detailed image instructions and a hierarchy of rubrics that decompose correctness into 6,076 criteria and 44,131 binary checks. Rubrics are derived from surrounding text and reference figures using large multimodal models, and are evaluated by an automated LMM-based judge with a principled penalty scheme that aggregates sub-question outcomes into interpretable criterion scores. We benchmark several representative text-to-image models on ProImage-Bench and find that, despite strong open-domain performance, the best base model reaches only 0.791 rubric accuracy and 0.553 criterion score overall, revealing substantial gaps in fine-grained scientific fidelity. Finally, we show that the same rubrics provide actionable supervision: feeding failed checks back into an editing model for iterative refinement boosts a strong generator from 0.653 to 0.865 in rubric accuracy and from 0.388 to 0.697 in criterion score. ProImage-Bench thus offers both a rigorous diagnostic for professional image generation and a scalable signal for improving specification-faithful scientific illustrations.

Large Language Models' (LLM) reasoning can be improved using test-time aggregation strategies, i.e., generating multiple samples and voting among generated samples. While these improve performance, they often reach a saturation point. Refinement offers an alternative by using LLM-generated feedback to improve solution quality. However, refinement introduces 3 key challenges: (1) Excessive refinement: Uniformly refining all instances can over-correct and reduce the overall performance. (2) Inability to localize and address errors: LLMs have a limited ability to self-correct and struggle to identify and correct their own mistakes. (3) Insufficient refinement: Deciding how many iterations of refinement are needed is non-trivial, and stopping too soon could leave errors unaddressed. To tackle these issues, we propose MAgICoRe, which avoids excessive refinement by categorizing problem difficulty as easy or hard, solving easy problems with coarse-grained aggregation and hard ones with fine-grained and iterative multi-agent refinement. To improve error localization, we incorporate external step-wise reward model (RM) scores. Moreover, to ensure effective refinement, we employ a multi-agent loop with three agents: Solver, Reviewer (which generates targeted feedback based on step-wise RM scores), and the Refiner (which incorporates feedback). To ensure sufficient refinement, we re-evaluate updated solutions, iteratively initiating further rounds of refinement. We evaluate MAgICoRe on Llama-3-8B and GPT-3.5 and show its effectiveness across 5 math datasets. Even one iteration of MAgICoRe beats Self-Consistency by 3.4%, Best-of-k by 3.2%, and Self-Refine by 4.0% while using less than half the samples. Unlike iterative refinement with baselines, MAgICoRe continues to improve with more iterations. Finally, our ablations highlight the importance of MAgICoRe's RMs and multi-agent communication.

Code generation has attracted increasing attention with the rise of Large Language Models (LLMs). Many studies have developed powerful code LLMs by synthesizing code-related instruction data and applying supervised fine-tuning. However, these methods are limited by teacher model distillation and ignore the potential of iterative refinement by self-generated code. In this paper, we propose Adaptive Critique Refinement (ACR), which enables the model to refine itself by self-generated code and external critique, rather than directly imitating the code responses of the teacher model. Concretely, ACR includes a composite scoring system with LLM-as-a-Judge to evaluate the quality of code responses and a selective critique strategy with LLM-as-a-Critic to critique self-generated low-quality code responses. We develop the RefineCoder series by iteratively applying ACR, achieving continuous performance improvement on multiple code generation benchmarks. Compared to the baselines of the same size, our proposed RefineCoder series can achieve comparable or even superior performance using less data.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has driven substantial progress in reasoning-intensive domains like mathematics. However, optimizing open-ended generation remains challenging due to the lack of ground truth. While rubric-based evaluation offers a structured proxy for verification, existing methods suffer from scalability bottlenecks and coarse criteria, resulting in a supervision ceiling effect. To address this, we propose an automated Coarse-to-Fine Rubric Generation framework. By synergizing principle-guided synthesis, multi-model aggregation, and difficulty evolution, our approach produces comprehensive and highly discriminative criteria capable of capturing the subtle nuances. Based on this framework, we introduce RubricHub, a large-scale (sim110k) and multi-domain dataset. We validate its utility through a two-stage post-training pipeline comprising Rubric-based Rejection Sampling Fine-Tuning (RuFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RuRL). Experimental results demonstrate that RubricHub unlocks significant performance gains: our post-trained Qwen3-14B achieves state-of-the-art (SOTA) results on HealthBench (69.3), surpassing proprietary frontier models such as GPT-5. The code and data will be released soon.

Rubric-based evaluation has become a prevailing paradigm for evaluating instruction following in large language models (LLMs). Despite its widespread use, the reliability of these rubric-level evaluations remains unclear, calling for meta-evaluation. However, prior meta-evaluation efforts largely focus on the response level, failing to assess the fine-grained judgment accuracy that rubric-based evaluation relies on. To bridge this gap, we introduce RubricEval. Our benchmark features: (1) the first rubric-level meta-evaluation benchmark for instruction following, (2) diverse instructions and responses spanning multiple categories and model sources, and (3) a substantial set of 3,486 quality-controlled instances, along with Easy/Hard subsets that better differentiates judge performance. Our experiments reveal that rubric-level judging remains far from solved: even GPT-4o, a widely adopted judge in instruction-following benchmarks, achieves only 55.97% on Hard subset. Considering evaluation paradigm, rubric-level evaluation outperforms checklist-level, explicit reasoning improves accuracy, and both together reduce inter-judge variance. Through our established rubric taxonomy, we further identify common failure modes and offer actionable insights for reliable instruction-following evaluation.

Large vision-language models have shown strong progress in UI-to-code generation, yet their test-time self-evolution remains unstable. We first identify a fundamental obstacle, termed visual repair coupling: a local code edit may propagate through layout, style, and component dependencies, correcting one visual mismatch while degrading regions that were previously faithful. To address this issue, we present RubSE, a Rubric-guided Self-Evolution framework that uses rubrics to represent visual feedback as a structured visual-repair context. At each refinement round, RubSE generates typed candidate rubrics, selects one prioritized repair target, and stores previously selected rubrics as history, thereby steering each revision toward a well-scoped visual repair while discouraging repeated or over-broad changes. Evaluations across six VLMs and three UI-to-code benchmarks demonstrate that RubSE substantially outperforms naïve self-evolution in final-round and best-round settings, achieving more stable refinement trajectories and a higher trajectory-level performance ceiling. Further analysis shows that RubSE mitigates trajectory collapse by improving recovery from severe visual regressions, and that stronger rubric generators can transfer effective visual-repair guidance to weaker code improvers.

Recent advances in self-refinement have demonstrated significant potential for improving the outputs of large language models (LLMs) through iterative refinement. However, most existing self-refinement methods rely on a reactive process with a fixed number of iterations, making it difficult to determine the optimal timing and content of refinement based on the evolving generation context. Inspired by the way humans dynamically refine their thoughts during execution, we propose ProActive Self-Refinement (PASR), a novel method that enables LLMs to refine their outputs during the generation process. Unlike methods that regenerate entire responses, PASR proactively decides whether, when, and how to refine based on the model's internal state and evolving context. We conduct extensive experiments on a diverse set of 10 tasks to evaluate the effectiveness of PASR. Experimental results show that PASR significantly enhances problem-solving performance. In particular, on Qwen3-8B, PASR reduces average token consumption by 41.6 percent compared to standard generation, while also achieving an 8.2 percent improvement in accuracy. Our code and all baselines used in the paper are available in the GitHub.

Recently, rubrics have been used to guide LLM judges in capturing subjective, nuanced, multi-dimensional human preferences, and have been extended from evaluation to reward signals for reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). However, rubric generation remains hard to control: rubrics often lack coverage, conflate dimensions, misalign preference direction, and contain redundant or highly correlated criteria, degrading judge accuracy and producing suboptimal rewards during RFT. We propose RRD, a principled framework for rubric refinement built on a recursive decompose-filter cycle. RRD decomposes coarse rubrics into fine-grained, discriminative criteria, expanding coverage while sharpening separation between responses. A complementary filtering mechanism removes misaligned and redundant rubrics, and a correlation-aware weighting scheme prevents over-representing highly correlated criteria, yielding rubric sets that are informative, comprehensive, and non-redundant. Empirically, RRD delivers large, consistent gains across both evaluation and training: it improves preference-judgment accuracy on JudgeBench and PPE for both GPT-4o and Llama3.1-405B judges, achieving top performance in all settings with up to +17.7 points on JudgeBench. When used as the reward source for RFT on WildChat, it yields substantially stronger and more stable learning signals, boosting reward by up to 160% (Qwen3-4B) and 60% (Llama3.1-8B) versus 10-20% for prior rubric baselines, with gains that transfer to HealthBench-Hard and BiGGen Bench. Overall, RRD establishes recursive rubric refinement as a scalable and interpretable foundation for LLM judging and reward modeling in open-ended domains.

Finetuning large language models on instruction data is crucial for enhancing pre-trained knowledge and improving instruction-following capabilities. As instruction datasets proliferate, selecting optimal data for effective training becomes increasingly important. This work addresses the question: How can we determine the optimal subset of data for effective training? While existing research often emphasizes local criteria like instance quality for subset selection, we argue that a global approach focused on data diversity is more critical. Our method employs k-means clustering to ensure the selected subset effectively represents the full dataset. We propose an iterative refinement method inspired by active learning techniques to resample instances from clusters, reassessing each cluster's importance and sampling weight in every training iteration. This approach reduces the effect of outliers and automatically filters out clusters containing low-quality data. Through extensive evaluation across natural language reasoning, general world knowledge, code and math reasoning tasks, and by fine-tuning models from various families, we observe consistent improvements, achieving a 7% increase over random selection and a 3.8% improvement over state-of-the-art sampling methods. Our work highlights the significance of diversity-first sampling when finetuning LLMs to enhance performance across a broad array of evaluation tasks. Our code is available at https://github.com/for-ai/iterative-data-selection.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become indispensable for evaluating writing. However, text feedback they provide is often unintelligible, generic, and not specific to user criteria. Inspired by structured rubrics in education and intelligible AI explanations, we propose iRULER following identified design guidelines to scaffold the review process by specific criteria, providing justification for score selection, and offering actionable revisions to target different quality levels. To qualify user-defined criteria, we recursively used iRULER with a rubric-of-rubrics to iteratively refine rubrics. In controlled experiments on writing revision and rubric creation, iRULER most improved validated LLM-judged review scores and was perceived as most helpful and aligned compared to read-only rubric and text-based LLM feedback. Qualitative findings further support how iRULER satisfies the design guidelines for user-defined feedback. This work contributes interactive rubric tools for intelligible LLM-based review and revision of writing, and user-defined rubric creation.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized code generation, standard "System 1" approaches, generating solutions in a single forward pass, often hit a performance ceiling when faced with complex algorithmic tasks. Existing iterative refinement strategies attempt to bridge this gap at inference time, yet they predominantly rely on external oracles, execution feedback, or computationally expensive prompt-response cycles. In this work, we propose ReflexiCoder, a novel reinforcement learning (RL) framework that internalizes the structured reasoning trajectory, encompassing initial generation, bug and optimization aware reflection, and self-correction, directly into the model's weights. Unlike prior methods, ReflexiCoder shifts the paradigm from external-dependent refinement to an intrinsic, fully autonomous self-reflection and self-correction capabilities at inference time. We utilize an RL-zero training paradigm with granular reward functions to optimize the entire reflection-correction trajectory, teaching the model how to debug without reliance on ground-truth feedback or execution engines at inference time. Extensive experiments across seven benchmarks demonstrate that our ReflexiCoder-8B establishes a new state-of-the-art (SOTA) among leading open-source models in the 1.5B-14B range, achieving 94.51% (87.20%) on HumanEval (Plus), 81.80% (78.57%) on MBPP (Plus), 35.00% on BigCodeBench, 52.21% on LiveCodeBench, and 37.34% on CodeForces in a single-attempt setting, rivaling or surpassing proprietary models like GPT-5.1. Notably, our framework is significantly more token-efficient than base models, reducing inference-time compute overhead by approximately 40% through disciplined, high-speed reasoning and reflection patterns. Source code is available at https://github.com/juyongjiang/ReflexiCoder.

Recently, multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have attracted increasing research attention due to their powerful visual understanding capabilities. While they have achieved impressive results on various vision tasks, their performance on chart-to-code generation remains suboptimal. This task requires MLLMs to generate executable code that can reproduce a given chart, demanding not only precise visual understanding but also accurate translation of visual elements into structured code. Directly prompting MLLMs to perform this complex task often yields unsatisfactory results. To address this challenge, we propose {ChartIR}, an iterative refinement method based on structured instruction. First, we distinguish two tasks: visual understanding and code translation. To accomplish the visual understanding component, we design two types of structured instructions: description and difference. The description instruction captures the visual elements of the reference chart, while the difference instruction characterizes the discrepancies between the reference chart and the generated chart. These instructions effectively transform visual features into language representations, thereby facilitating the subsequent code translation process. Second, we decompose the overall chart generation pipeline into two stages: initial code generation and iterative refinement, enabling progressive enhancement of the final output. Experimental results show that, compared to other method, our method achieves superior performance on both the open-source model Qwen2-VL and the closed-source model GPT-4o.

Text-to-Image (T2I) models and Unified Multimodal Models (UMMs) have achieved remarkable progress in visual generation. However, their reliance on a single-pass generation paradigm limits their ability to handle complex prompts requiring iterative refinement. To enable multi-round Reflective Visual Generation (RVG), we formalize the Reason-Reflect-Rectify (R^3) loop as a core framework and introduce R^3-Bench, a benchmark of over 600 expert-annotated instances that quantifies iterative reasoning and rectification capabilities. Evaluation on R^3-Bench reveals a critical gap: while state-of-the-art models can identify generation errors, they fail to generate actionable rectification instructions. To bridge this gap, we propose R^3-Refiner, a dual-stage framework leveraging Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) and a Hierarchical Reward Mechanism (HRM) to better align rectification with reflective reasoning. Experiments show that R^3-Refiner achieves significant improvements on R^3-Bench (+12.0% in Reflective Verdict Score, +9.0% in Rectification Score), and can be seamlessly integrated with various MLLMs to enhance the generation quality of different T2I models on GenEval++ and T2I-CompBench. Code is available at https://github.com/xiaomoguhz/R3-Bench.

Autonomous scientific research agents are increasingly applied to end-to-end scientific workflows, including literature review, data analysis, experimentation, and report generation. However, open-ended research tasks often do not clearly specify the analyses, methods, and success criteria required to complete the task. As a result, agents may miss important analyses, use inappropriate methods, or draw conclusions that are insufficiently supported by evidence. To address the problem, we present AutoSciRub, an evaluation-first framework that induces a task-specific executable rubric before research execution, and uses it to guide execution, criterion-level verification as well as iterative revision. AutoSciRub decomposes an underspecified instruction into atomic scientific goals, grounds them in relevant literature and task-visible data, and synthesizes specific, actionable, and verifiable criteria. The resulting rubric makes implicit experimental and evidential requirements explicit, providing guidance for experiments and analyses. During revision, rubric-guided verification identifies unmet criteria and enables targeted refinement of the research report and its supporting artifacts. On ResearchClawBench, AutoSciRub consistently improves all tested configurations, with an average gain of 2.08 points across three backbone LLMs under the fixed Codex harness and 2.95 points across three agent harnesses using a fixed DeepSeek-V4-Flash backbone. On a randomly sampled 20-task subset of AstaBench E2E Discovery, AutoSciRub further achieves an average improvement of 16.8 points across three agent harnesses, while maintaining or increasing the number of successfully completed tasks. These results demonstrate that evaluation-first guidance provides an effective and generalizable control mechanism for autonomous scientific research (Code: https://github.com/zjunlp/AutoSciRub).

Writing GPU kernels is a challenging task and critical for AI systems' efficiency. It is also highly iterative: domain experts write code and improve performance through execution feedback. Moreover, it presents verifiable rewards like correctness and speedup, making it a natural environment to apply Reinforcement Learning (RL). To explicitly incorporate the iterative nature of this process into training, we develop a flexible multi-turn RL recipe that addresses unique challenges encountered in real-world settings, such as learning from long trajectories and effective reward attribution across turns. We present Kevin - K(ernel D)evin, the first model trained with multi-turn RL for CUDA kernel generation and optimization. In our evaluation setup, Kevin shows significant gains over its base model (QwQ-32B), improving correctness of generated kernels (in pure CUDA) from 56% to 82% and mean speedup from 0.53x to 1.10x of baseline (PyTorch Eager), and surpassing frontier models like o4-mini (0.78x). Finally, we study its behavior across test-time scaling axes: we found scaling serial refinement more beneficial than parallel sampling. In particular, when given more refinement turns, Kevin shows a higher rate of improvement.

Unified multimodal models (UMMs) integrate visual understanding and generation within a single framework. For text-to-image (T2I) tasks, this unified capability allows UMMs to refine outputs after their initial generation, potentially extending the performance upper bound. Current UMM-based refinement methods primarily follow a refinement-via-editing (RvE) paradigm, where UMMs produce editing instructions to modify misaligned regions while preserving aligned content. However, editing instructions often describe prompt-image misalignment only coarsely, leading to incomplete refinement. Moreover, pixel-level preservation, though necessary for editing, unnecessarily restricts the effective modification space for refinement. To address these limitations, we propose Refinement via Regeneration (RvR), a novel framework that reformulates refinement as conditional image regeneration rather than editing. Instead of relying on editing instructions and enforcing strict content preservation, RvR regenerates images conditioned on the target prompt and the semantic tokens of the initial image, enabling more complete semantic alignment with a larger modification space. Extensive experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of RvR, improving Geneval from 0.78 to 0.91, DPGBench from 84.02 to 87.21, and UniGenBench++ from 61.53 to 77.41.

Existing methods for text-to-CAD generation either operate in a single pass with no geometric verification or rely on lossy visual feedback that cannot resolve dimensional errors. We present CADSmith, a multi-agent pipeline that generates CadQuery code from natural language. It then undergoes an iterative refinement process through two nested correction loops: an inner loop that resolves execution errors and an outer loop grounded in programmatic geometric validation. The outer loop combines exact measurements from the OpenCASCADE kernel (bounding box dimensions, volume, solid validity) with holistic visual assessment from an independent vision-language model Judge. This provides both the numerical precision and the high-level shape awareness needed to converge on the correct geometry. The system uses retrieval-augmented generation over API documentation rather than fine-tuning, maintaining a current database as the underlying CAD library evolves. We evaluate on a custom benchmark of 100 prompts in three difficulty tiers (T1 through T3) with three ablation configurations. Against a zero-shot baseline, CADSmith achieves a 100% execution rate (up from 95%), improves the median F1 score from 0.9707 to 0.9846, the median IoU from 0.8085 to 0.9629, and reduces the mean Chamfer Distance from 28.37 to 0.74, demonstrating that closed-loop refinement with programmatic geometric feedback substantially improves the quality and reliability of LLM-generated CAD models.

LLM-based Triton kernel generation has attracted significant interest, yet a fundamental empirical question remains unanswered: where does this capability break down, and why? We present KernelBench-X, a benchmark designed to answer this question through category-aware evaluation of correctness and hardware efficiency across 176 tasks in 15 categories. Our systematic comparison of five representative methods yields three main findings. First, task structure determines correctness more than method design. Category explains nearly three times more variance in semantic correctness than method (9.4% vs 3.3% explained deviance), and 72% of Fusion tasks fail across all five methods while Math tasks are solved consistently. Second, iterative refinement improves correctness, but not performance. Across GEAK iterations, compile rate rises from 52.3% to 68.8% while average speedup declines from 1.58times to 1.44times; newly rescued kernels consistently underperform persistently correct ones (1.16times vs 1.58times speedup in round~0to1). Third, correctness does not imply efficiency. 46.6% of correct kernels are slower than the PyTorch eager baseline, and cross-hardware speedup variance reaches 21.4times. Besides, quantization remains completely unsolved (0/30 successes) despite non-trivial compilation rates, revealing systematic misunderstanding of numerical computation contracts rather than surface-level syntax errors. These findings suggest that future progress depends on handling global coordination, explicitly modeling numerical precision, and incorporating hardware efficiency into generation. The code is available at https://github.com/BonnieW05/KernelBenchX

Recent improvements in text generation have leveraged human feedback to improve the quality of the generated output. However, human feedback is not always available, especially during inference. In this work, we propose an inference time optimization method FITO to use fine-grained actionable feedback in the form of error type, error location and severity level that are predicted by a learned error pinpoint model for iterative refinement. FITO starts with an initial output, then iteratively incorporates the feedback via a refinement model that generates an improved output conditioned on the feedback. Given the uncertainty of consistent refined samples at iterative steps, we formulate iterative refinement into a local search problem and develop a simulated annealing based algorithm that balances exploration of the search space and optimization for output quality. We conduct experiments on three text generation tasks, including machine translation, long-form question answering (QA) and topical summarization. We observe 0.8 and 0.7 MetricX gain on Chinese-English and English-German translation, 4.5 and 1.8 ROUGE-L gain at long form QA and topic summarization respectively, with a single iteration of refinement. With our simulated annealing algorithm, we see further quality improvements, including up to 1.7 MetricX improvements over the baseline approach.

Large language models (LLMs) have recently shown strong progress on scientific reasoning, yet two major bottlenecks remain. First, explicit retrieval fragments reasoning, imposing a hidden "tool tax" of extra tokens and steps. Second, multi-agent pipelines often dilute strong solutions by averaging across all candidates. We address these challenges with a unified framework that combines implicit retrieval and structured collaboration. At its foundation, a Monitor-based retrieval module operates at the token level, integrating external knowledge with minimal disruption to reasoning. On top of this substrate, Hierarchical Solution Refinement (HSR) iteratively designates each candidate as an anchor to be repaired by its peers, while Quality-Aware Iterative Reasoning (QAIR) adapts refinement to solution quality. On Humanity's Last Exam (HLE) Bio/Chem Gold, our framework achieves 48.3\% accuracy -- the highest reported to date, surpassing the strongest agent baseline by 13.4 points and leading frontier LLMs by up to 18.1 points, while simultaneously reducing token usage by 53.5\% and agent steps by 43.7\%. Results on SuperGPQA and TRQA confirm robustness across domains. Error analysis shows that reasoning failures and knowledge gaps co-occur in over 85\% of cases, while diversity analysis reveals a clear dichotomy: retrieval tasks benefit from solution variety, whereas reasoning tasks favor consensus. Together, these findings demonstrate how implicit augmentation and structured refinement overcome the inefficiencies of explicit tool use and uniform aggregation. Code is available at: https://github.com/tangxiangru/Eigen-1.

Vision-language models (VLMs) have shown strong capabilities in generating visualization code from textual or visual specifications. However, real-world visualization authoring is inherently iterative: users frequently revise existing visualizations to repair flawed charts or adapt them to desired styles. Existing benchmarks primarily evaluate generation from scratch, leaving visualization code editing from multimodal feedback largely unexplored. We introduce VisEditBench, a benchmark of 1,395 human-annotated visualization code-editing tasks grounded in realistic visualization workflows and failure cases. VisEditBench covers two practical settings: feedback-guided repair, where models revise visualization code using buggy or marked charts together with textual feedback, and reference-guided restyling, where models modify code to match a target chart image. Evaluating 20 state-of-the-art VLMs reveals that visualization code editing remains challenging: Claude-4.6-Sonnet achieves the best overall pass rate of 74.46%, while most open-source models remain below 50%. Performance is particularly weak on visually grounded style adaptation, where Claude-4.6-Sonnet achieves only 55.71%. To establish a strong baseline, we further propose VisEditAgent, a render-grounded editing framework that iteratively generates, executes, validates, and refines candidate edits. Built on GPT-4o, VisEditAgent improves overall pass rate from 55.75% to 67.99%, demonstrating the importance of render-grounded feedback for faithful visualization editing. We will release VisEditBench at https://github.com/vis-nlp/VisEditBench.

As Large Language Models (LLMs) advance toward open-ended autonomous agents, the mechanisms used to evaluate and guide their behavior must evolve accordingly. This work introduces the rubric as a unifying framework capturing this evolution, characterizing rubrics as a dynamic response to successive LLM paradigm shifts that recurs across otherwise independent efforts in evaluation, reinforcement learning, and safety alignment. We define rubrics as explicit criteria sets that transform complex quality judgments into structured and actionable standards, and demonstrate that their recurrence across these research threads is not coincidental. We systematically organize existing rubric designs, examine their construction and optimization, and analyze their role across evaluation and training. Rubrics manifest at three progressively deeper levels: at the evaluative level, they decompose holistic judgments into verifiable dimensions; at the training level, they serve as dense feedback signals providing process-level guidance where scalar rewards fall short; at the intrinsic level, they emerge dynamically from model behaviors, driving self-improvement. We further assess rubric reliability across generation quality, execution fidelity, theoretical constraints, and security threats, before surveying rubric-based benchmarks across diverse domains. By rendering assessment transparent and decomposable, rubrics translate human value expectations into machine-learnable signals, serving as the enduring bridge between human intentions and machine behavior.

Rubric-based RL is a promising route for extending reinforcement learning beyond verifiable rewards, yet existing methods optimize rubrics while treating the query distribution as fixed. We identify a structural bottleneck: rubric quality is constrained by query structure. Open-ended queries yield vague rubrics; naively narrowing them introduces fabricated references that no model can verify, so all responses fail and training receives no reward signal. We present QUBRIC, a framework that co-designs queries and rubrics. Teacher-derived key points ground the rewriting of open-ended queries into scenario-based, evaluable questions. Contrastive rubric generation then turns teacher-policy gaps into query-level criteria, and learnability filtering retains only informative query-rubric pairs for GRPO training. QUBRIC achieves a +5.5 point gain on ArenaHard over the SFT baseline. Trained only on instruction-following data, it further transfers to three held-out benchmarks spanning legal, moral, and narrative reasoning (+6.3 points on average), with improvements concentrated in reasoning-related dimensions. These results provide evidence that co-designing queries and rubrics can make rubric-based RL a practical complement to RLVR beyond strictly verifiable tasks.

Techniques for reliable rubric-based LLM evaluation -- ensemble judging, bias mitigation, few-shot calibration -- are scattered across papers with inconsistent terminology and partial implementations. We introduce Autorubric, an open-source framework that unifies these rubric-based LLM evaluation lessons with opinionated defaults: analytic rubrics with binary, ordinal, and nominal criteria; single-judge and ensemble evaluation; few-shot calibration; bias mitigations; and psychometric reliability metrics. We validate on three benchmarks: RiceChem (college chemistry grading, 80\% accuracy with 5-shot calibration), ResearcherBench (deep research evaluation, 931 criteria, cross-judge agreement analysis), and CHARM-100, a new chatbot evaluation dataset combining all three criterion types with ground truth labels (87\% binary accuracy, moderate-to-substantial κ). Beyond measurement, per-criterion scores and explanations serve as optimization signals. We demonstrate how Autorubric's rubric-evaluation explanations raise a peer review agent's score from 0.47 to 0.85 (above the 0.82 expert-curated baseline), and its scores serve as RL rewards to produce statistically significant improvement on AdvancedIF (+0.039, Wilcoxon p = 0.032) with positive transfer to IFEval. In all of these cases, Autorubric enabled us to rapidly operationalize various rubric design choices and best practices with minimal effort.

Scalar reward models compress multi-dimensional human preferences into a single opaque score, creating an information bottleneck that often leads to brittleness and reward hacking in open-ended alignment. We argue that robust alignment for non-verifiable tasks is fundamentally a principle generalization problem: reward should not be a learned function internalized into a judge, but an explicit reasoning process executed under inspectable principles. To operationalize this view, we present the Open Rubric System (OpenRS), a plug-and-play, rubrics-based LLM-as-a-Judge framework built around Pairwise Adaptive Meta-Rubrics (PAMR) and lightweight Pointwise Verifiable Rubrics (PVRs), which provide both hard-constraint guardrails and verifiable reward components when ground-truth or programmatic checks are available. OpenRS uses an explicit meta-rubric -- a constitution-like specification that governs how rubrics are instantiated, weighted, and enforced -- and instantiates adaptive rubrics on the fly by conditioning on the semantic differences between two candidate responses. It then performs criterion-wise pairwise comparisons and aggregates criterion-level preferences externally, avoiding pointwise weighted scalarization while improving discriminability in open-ended settings. To keep principles consistent yet editable across various domains, we introduce a two-level meta-rubric refinement pipeline (automated evolutionary refinement for general principles and a reproducible human-in-the-loop procedure for domain principles), complemented with pointwise verifiable rubrics that act as both guardrails against degenerate behaviors and a source of verifiable reward for objective sub-tasks. Finally, we instantiate OpenRS as reward supervision in pairwise RL training.

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in code generation, they often produce solutions that lack guarantees of correctness, robustness, and efficiency. This limitation is particularly acute in domains requiring strict constraints. CodeGrad introduces a principled framework that integrates rigorous verification techniques directly into an iterative LLM-based generation loop. It uniquely treats code as a differentiable variable, converting structured feedback and mathematical constraints into a textual pseudo-gradient. This gradient guides the model to iteratively refine solutions, ensuring they are not only functional but also robust and mathematically justified. We evaluate CodeGrad on the HumanEval, HumanEval+, and LiveCodeBench benchmarks. Our implementation outperforms strong baselines, achieving an absolute improvement of up to 27% on HumanEval and a 41% relative improvement on the challenging LiveCodeBench V6. StructuredGrad generates mathematically justified code that is robust and efficient, paving the way for reliable AI-assisted software development in high-stakes applications.

Designing structured visuals such as presentation slides is essential for communicative needs, necessitating both content creation and visual planning skills. In this work, we tackle the challenge of automated slide generation, where models produce slide presentations from natural language (NL) instructions. We first introduce the SlidesBench benchmark, the first benchmark for slide generation with 7k training and 585 testing examples derived from 310 slide decks across 10 domains. SlidesBench supports evaluations that are (i)reference-based to measure similarity to a target slide, and (ii)reference-free to measure the design quality of generated slides alone. We benchmark end-to-end image generation and program generation methods with a variety of models, and find that programmatic methods produce higher-quality slides in user-interactable formats. Built on the success of program generation, we create AutoPresent, an 8B Llama-based model trained on 7k pairs of instructions paired with code for slide generation, and achieve results comparable to the closed-source model GPT-4o. We further explore iterative design refinement where the model is tasked to self-refine its own output, and we found that this process improves the slide's quality. We hope that our work will provide a basis for future work on generating structured visuals.

Recent advancements in prompt engineering strategies, such as Chain-of-Thought (CoT) and Self-Discover, have demonstrated significant potential in improving the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, these state-of-the-art (SOTA) prompting strategies rely on single or fixed set of static seed reasoning modules like "think step by step" or "break down this problem" intended to simulate human approach to problem-solving. This constraint limits the flexibility of models in tackling diverse problems effectively. In this paper, we introduce Auto-Evolve, a novel framework that enables LLMs to self-create dynamic reasoning modules and downstream action plan, resulting in significant improvements over current SOTA methods. We evaluate Auto-Evolve on the challenging BigBench-Hard (BBH) dataset with Claude 2.0, Claude 3 Sonnet, Mistral Large, and GPT 4, where it consistently outperforms the SOTA prompt strategies. Auto-Evolve outperforms CoT by up to 10.4% and on an average by 7% across these four models. Our framework introduces two innovations: a) Auto-Evolve dynamically generates reasoning modules for each task while aligning with human reasoning paradigm, thus eliminating the need for predefined templates. b) We introduce an iterative refinement component, that incrementally refines instruction guidance for LLMs and helps boost performance by average 2.8% compared to doing it in a single step.

Large language models are increasingly used as scalable evaluators for open-ended tasks. However, many LLM judges derive query-specific criteria during scoring, leaving the evaluation requirements insufficiently specified and their coverage difficult to audit. Query-specific rubrics make these requirements explicit, but expert-written rubrics are costly to construct, while existing automatic methods typically rely on inference-time refinement or external supervision. We introduce GenRubric, a self-evolving framework that improves rubric generation from unlabeled queries without requiring additional human annotations during self-evolution. Our approach is based on rubric-induced self-consistency: independently sampled rubrics for the same query provide partial views of its latent evaluation requirements, and a comprehensive rubric should induce a response that generalizes across these complementary evaluation views. We implement this principle through reinforcement learning, combining a cross-rubric comprehensiveness signal with group-level and criterion-level rewards for rubric quality. We train GenRubric models at 4B, 8B, and 14B scales across multiple domains. Experiments on human-annotated rubric benchmarks show that self-evolution improves the agreement between evaluations induced by generated rubrics and those induced by expert-written rubrics. The improvements further generalize to held-out domains, demonstrating the potential of self-evolving rubric generation for scalable and query-specific LLM evaluation. Code and models are publicly available at https://github.com/foggpoy/GenRubric.

Data refinement involves executing multi-step recipes over evolving text states, where both composition and execution order of processing operators determine the outcome. While existing benchmarks either isolate text editing or entangle it with code and tool execution, it remains unclear whether LLMs can directly and faithfully execute these compositional, order-sensitive data refinement recipes. To fill this gap, we introduce CDR-Bench, a comprehensive benchmark featuring 3,462 high-quality tasks spanning four real-world data refinement domains and 29 distinct operators. Our benchmark evaluates models across atomic, order-agnostic, and order-sensitive settings, leveraging deterministic reference outputs to enable exact evaluation. Experiments on 10+ state-of-the-art LLMs reveal consistent failure patterns: performance degrades sharply in compositional settings, and order-sensitive recipe success collapses. These findings underline that current LLMs lack the procedural faithfulness required for reliable compositional data refinement.

Computer-Aided Design is pivotal in modern manufacturing, yet existing automated methods predominantly rely on open-loop, one-shot generation, creating a mismatch with iterative real-world practices. In this paper, we present IterCAD, a unified multimodal agent framework for closed-loop, interactive CAD generation and editing. We formulate the task as a multi-turn interaction between a multimodal agent and an executable CAD sandbox, covering three tasks: Drawing-to-Code, Text-to-Code, and Interactive Editing. To support this, we develop a data synthesis pipeline incorporating advanced industrial manufacturing features to generate standard-compliant multi-view engineering drawings, complex code-editing tasks, and high-fidelity interaction trajectories. We optimize the agent via progressive SFT followed by geometry-aware reinforcement learning with viable-prefix masking to enhance code executability and geometric fidelity. Finally, we introduce the IterCAD-Bench evaluation suite and propose the Chamfer Distance Tolerance-Recall (CD-TR) curve alongside its AUC-TR metric, establishing a survivor-bias-free standard that unifies code validity and geometric precision. Extensive experiments demonstrate that IterCAD achieves highly competitive performance across multiple benchmarks, significantly outperforming existing approaches in both code executability and geometric precision, while exhibiting superior capabilities in closed-loop iterative refinement.

Large language models have shown surprising performances in understanding instructions and performing natural language tasks. In this paper, we propose iterative translation refinement to leverage the power of large language models for more natural translation and post-editing. We show that by simply involving a large language model in an iterative process, the output quality improves beyond mere translation. Extensive test scenarios with GPT-3.5 reveal that although iterations reduce string-based metric scores, neural metrics indicate comparable if not improved translation quality. Further, human evaluations demonstrate that our method effectively reduces translationese compared to initial GPT translations and even human references, especially for into-English directions. Ablation studies underscore the importance of anchoring the refinement process to the source input and a reasonable initial translation.

In realistic education, a solution is often expressed not only in words but in a drawing--a circuit, a geometric construction, a function plot--and a teacher must grade the drawing as carefully as the text. Recent advances in unified multimodal models have enabled scientific image generation, yet verifying the correctness of these specialized visual outputs remains a critical bottleneck: errors often arise from intricate domain knowledge, structural reasoning, and multi-step instruction rather than surface-level artifacts. Existing verifiers mainly target natural images and compress judgement into scalar scores, leaving scientific coverage and explainable feedback for error correction underexplored. To bridge this gap, we make three main contributions. (1) We construct SciGen-Verify, a benchmark dedicated to explainable verification of scientific image generation, spanning instruction following, multidisciplinary reasoning, and world knowledge domains. It contains a three-tier hierarchical protocol over the binary judgement, supporting explanation, and corrective editing instruction. (2) We develop SciGen-Verifier, a reasoning-driven multimodal verifier trained via cold-start supervised fine-tuning followed by a curriculum-based two-stage reinforcement learning pipeline. The rubric-guided process rewards first strengthen scientific reasoning exploration and outcome rewards subsequently align output with ground-truth annotation. (3) On SciGen-Verify, SciGen-Verifier achieves competitive performance against much larger proprietary models. It further serves as a practical online critic for iterative image rectification.

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance on complex reasoning tasks such as competitive programming (CP), existing methods predominantly focus on single-attempt settings, overlooking their capacity for iterative refinement. In this paper, we present RefineRL, a novel approach designed to unleash the self-refinement capabilities of LLMs for CP problem solving. RefineRL introduces two key innovations: (1) Skeptical-Agent, an iterative self-refinement agent equipped with local execution tools to validate generated solutions against public test cases of CP problems. This agent always maintains a skeptical attitude towards its own outputs and thereby enforces rigorous self-refinement even when validation suggests correctness. (2) A reinforcement learning (RL) solution to incentivize LLMs to self-refine with only standard RLVR data (i.e., problems paired with their verifiable answers). Extensive experiments on Qwen3-4B and Qwen3-4B-2507 demonstrate that our method yields substantial gains: after our RL training, these compact 4B models integrated with the Skeptical-Agent not only outperform much larger 32B models but also approach the single-attempt performance of 235B models. These findings suggest that self-refinement holds considerable promise for scaling LLM reasoning, with significant potential for further advancement.

Rubric-based evaluation is a promising paradigm for judging large language model (LLM) outputs, yet self-generated rubrics lag human-annotated criteria on hard instances. We argue this discriminative gap reflects an objective mismatch: self-generated rubrics describe good responses, whereas effective criteria must discriminate between close candidates. To close this gap, we introduce SVR (Support Vector Rubrics), a framework that recasts rubric construction as max-margin boundary learning over preference data. SVR mines contrastive features from preference pairs into a rubric bank, learns a prompt-conditioned selector together with global rubric weights, and iteratively refines the bank through support-pair selection and adversarial probing of hard negatives. At inference, given only the prompt, SVR retrieves the top-rubrics from the bank and scores responses. On RubricBench, SVR narrows the gap to human reference rubrics from 24.1 to 0.3 points and outperforms strong self-rubric and judge baselines, and the learned bank transfers across judges without retraining. On RewardBench 1&2, and RM-Bench, it remains competitive with dedicated reward models, demonstrating broader reward modeling capability. Overall, boundary-defining rubrics offer a principled route to closing the discriminative gap in LLM evaluation.

Tool learning, which allows Large Language Models (LLMs) to leverage external tools for solving complex user tasks, has emerged as a promising avenue for extending model capabilities. However, current approaches primarily focus on data synthesis for fine-tuning LLMs to invoke tools effectively, largely ignoring how to fully stimulate the potential of the model. In this paper, we propose ToolACE-R, a novel method that introduces adaptive self-refinement for tool invocations. Our approach features a model-aware iterative training procedure that progressively incorporates more training samples based on the model's evolving capabilities. Additionally, it allows LLMs to iteratively refine their tool calls, optimizing performance without requiring external feedback. To further enhance computational efficiency, we integrate an adaptive mechanism when scaling the inference time, enabling the model to autonomously determine when to stop the refinement process. We conduct extensive experiments across several benchmark datasets, showing that ToolACE-R achieves competitive performance compared to advanced API-based models, even without any refinement. Furthermore, its performance can be further improved efficiently through adaptive self-refinement. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method, which is compatible with base models of various sizes, offering a promising direction for more efficient tool learning.

As Large Language Model (LLM) alignment evolves from simple completions to complex, highly sophisticated generation, Reward Models are increasingly shifting toward rubric-guided evaluation to mitigate surface-level biases. However, the community lacks a unified benchmark to assess this evaluation paradigm, as existing benchmarks lack both the discriminative complexity and the ground-truth rubric annotations required for rigorous analysis. To bridge this gap, we introduce RubricBench, a curated benchmark with 1,147 pairwise comparisons specifically designed to assess the reliability of rubric-based evaluation. Our construction employs a multi-dimensional filtration pipeline to target hard samples featuring nuanced input complexity and misleading surface bias, augmenting each with expert-annotated, atomic rubrics derived strictly from instructions. Comprehensive experiments reveal a substantial capability gap between human-annotated and model-generated rubrics, indicating that even state-of-the-art models struggle to autonomously specify valid evaluation criteria, lagging considerably behind human-guided performance.

We introduce ``Idea to Image,'' a system that enables multimodal iterative self-refinement with GPT-4V(ision) for automatic image design and generation. Humans can quickly identify the characteristics of different text-to-image (T2I) models via iterative explorations. This enables them to efficiently convert their high-level generation ideas into effective T2I prompts that can produce good images. We investigate if systems based on large multimodal models (LMMs) can develop analogous multimodal self-refinement abilities that enable exploring unknown models or environments via self-refining tries. Idea2Img cyclically generates revised T2I prompts to synthesize draft images, and provides directional feedback for prompt revision, both conditioned on its memory of the probed T2I model's characteristics. The iterative self-refinement brings Idea2Img various advantages over vanilla T2I models. Notably, Idea2Img can process input ideas with interleaved image-text sequences, follow ideas with design instructions, and generate images of better semantic and visual qualities. The user preference study validates the efficacy of multimodal iterative self-refinement on automatic image design and generation.

Efficient GPU kernels are crucial for building performant machine learning architectures, but writing them is a time-consuming challenge that requires significant expertise; therefore, we explore using language models (LMs) to automate kernel generation. We introduce KernelBench, an open-source framework for evaluating LMs' ability to write fast and correct kernels on a suite of 250 carefully selected PyTorch ML workloads. KernelBench represents a real-world engineering environment and making progress on the introduced benchmark directly translates to faster practical kernels. We introduce a new evaluation metric fast_p, which measures the percentage of generated kernels that are functionally correct and offer a speedup greater than an adjustable threshold p over baseline. Our experiments across various state-of-the-art models and test-time methods show that frontier reasoning models perform the best out of the box but still fall short overall, matching the PyTorch baseline in less than 20% of the cases. While we show that results can improve by leveraging execution and profiling feedback during iterative refinement, KernelBench remains a challenging benchmark, with its difficulty increasing as we raise speedup threshold p.

Recent progress in large language models (LLMs) has led to impressive performance on a range of tasks, yet advanced instruction following (IF)-especially for complex, multi-turn, and system-prompted instructions-remains a significant challenge. Rigorous evaluation and effective training for such capabilities are hindered by the lack of high-quality, human-annotated benchmarks and reliable, interpretable reward signals. In this work, we introduce AdvancedIF (we will release this benchmark soon), a comprehensive benchmark featuring over 1,600 prompts and expert-curated rubrics that assess LLMs ability to follow complex, multi-turn, and system-level instructions. We further propose RIFL (Rubric-based Instruction-Following Learning), a novel post-training pipeline that leverages rubric generation, a finetuned rubric verifier, and reward shaping to enable effective reinforcement learning for instruction following. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RIFL substantially improves the instruction-following abilities of LLMs, achieving a 6.7% absolute gain on AdvancedIF and strong results on public benchmarks. Our ablation studies confirm the effectiveness of each component in RIFL. This work establishes rubrics as a powerful tool for both training and evaluating advanced IF in LLMs, paving the way for more capable and reliable AI systems.

Rubric-based evaluation is widely used in LLM benchmarks and training pipelines for open-ended, less verifiable tasks. While prior work has demonstrated the effectiveness of rubrics using downstream signals such as reinforcement learning outcomes, there remains no principled way to diagnose how a rubric itself fails from such aggregated or downstream signals alone. To address this gap, we introduce RIFT: RubrIc Failure mode Taxonomy, a taxonomy for systematically characterizing failure modes in rubric composition and design. RIFT consists of eight failure modes organized into three high-level categories: Reliability Failures, Content Validity Failures, and Consequential Validity Failures. RIFT is developed using grounded theory by iteratively annotating rubrics drawn from five diverse data sources spanning general instruction following, code generation, creative writing, and expert-level deep research, until no new failure modes are identified. We evaluate the consistency of the taxonomy by measuring agreement among independent human annotators, observing fair agreement overall (87% pairwise agreement and 0.64 average Cohen's kappa). Finally, to support scalable diagnosis, we propose automated rubric quality metrics and show that they align with human failure-mode annotations, achieving up to 0.925 F1.

Interactive web application generation requires models to produce usable HTML, CSS, and JavaScript applications from natural language requests. Unlike conventional code generation, application quality depends on multiple user-facing functional requirements, each often tied to localized code regions such as event handlers, state updates, DOM fragments, or CSS selectors. Standard GRPO collapses these structured outcomes into a single sequence-level reward and applies the resulting advantage uniformly to all tokens, weakening credit assignment. We propose Rubric-to-Code Credit Assignment (RCCA), a reinforcement learning framework that converts rubric-level functional feedback into localized optimization signals over generated code. RCCA builds training tasks around explicit functional rubrics, uses a hierarchical reward to separate format, source-code, runtime, and functional failures, and aligns evaluator-generated textual attributions with responsible code spans and generated tokens. The resulting model, Ling-RCCA-Flash, scores 41.25 on MiniAppBench, improving Ling-3.0-Flash by 32.20 points and slightly surpassing Claude Opus 4.5. It also reaches 76.19 on ArtifactsBench, improving the SFT model by 4.48 points and establishing a new top score under the official ArtifactsBench leaderboard setting by surpassing the GPT-5 score by 3.64 points, suggesting transferable implementation-level gains.

Reward models play an essential role in aligning visual generative models, yet most existing visual reward models use a single scalar score or rely on fixed criteria that cannot adapt to different instructions. This limits both interpretability and task sensitivity, especially for text-to-image generation and instruction-based image editing, where different inputs require different evaluation dimensions. We propose RubricRM, a pairwise generative reward modeling framework that first produces an input-specific rubric with evaluation dimensions, weights, and scoring criteria, and then applies the rubric to score candidate images. We train dedicated RubricRM models for text-to-image generation and image editing using a two-stage training pipeline: supervised fine-tuning teaches the model the rubric-based scoring paradigm, while GRPO further improves scoring through fine-grained dimension-level rewards. Experiments on multiple generation and editing benchmarks show that RubricRM outperforms existing specialized reward models and remains competitive with strong proprietary MLLM judges despite using smaller backbones. Our models, data, and code are available at https://github.com/zijiankan/RubricRM.

We present Research Math Agents (RMA), an agentic framework for automated reasoning on research-level mathematical problems. Unlike prior studies centered on competition mathematics or formal theorem proving, RMA targets research-level mathematical problems that require long-horizon reasoning, literature grounding, and iterative proof refinement. RMA decomposes research-level proof solving into specialized modules for problem analysis, literature search and understanding, fair comparison, knowledge-bank construction, and proof verification, all coordinated by initializer, proposer, and verifier agents through a shared structured memory. Within this unified framework, these agents operate in a multi-role, multi-round workflow, collaboratively generating, refining, and verifying candidate proofs through iterative feedback. We evaluate RMA on the First Proof benchmark, which consists of ten research-level problems contributed by expert mathematicians across diverse domains. Through comprehensive expert evaluation, RMA outperforms strong baselines on the First Proof benchmark, including GPT-5.2R and Aletheia, solving eight out of ten research problems and producing more logically sound and readable proofs. Our comprehensive ablation studies further show that performance gains arise from the interaction of structured reasoning modules, iterative refinement, and verifier-based feedback, rather than any single component. Our solutions and implementations will be made publicly available upon acceptance.

Instance-specific rubrics are common in AI benchmarks where reliable evaluation requires specific expert knowledge. This approach is difficult to scale, prompting research into the generation of rubrics with large language models (LLMs). However, even when expert rubrics are available as references, it is unclear how to productively evaluate the quality of generated rubrics at scale. In this paper, we introduce a method for the evaluation of rubric generation, which we call Interventional Transfer (IT), based on the idea that two rubrics are similar if they move together when a response is perturbed to pass/fail one of them. In contrast to existing approaches for evaluation of rubric generation, we argue that different forms of interventional transfer can be used to evaluate the utility of generated rubrics for different tasks. For instance, we apply this approach in a case study on HealthBench, where we demonstrate an asymmetry in rubrics generated by Qwen3.8-27B, Deepseek-V4-Flash, and Opus-5, used to evaluate responses from GPT-5.6-Terra. Perturbations that degrade responses according to the generated/expert rubric transfer into lower scores on the corresponding expert/generated rubric, but perturbations that improve on one rubric do not reliably transfer into higher scores on the other. We argue that this finding has implications for the usage of LLM-generated rubrics for performance monitoring and hill-climbing. We contrast our approach with existing approaches for rubric evaluation, which do not surface the same asymmetry that we observe.

Can language models (LMs) self-refine their own responses? This question is increasingly relevant as a wide range of real-world user interactions involve refinement requests. However, prior studies have largely tested LMs' refinement abilities on verifiable tasks such as competition math or symbolic reasoning with simplified scaffolds, whereas users often pose open-ended queries and provide varying degrees of feedback on what they desire. The recent advent of reasoning models that exhibit self-reflection patterns in their chains-of-thought further motivates this question. To analyze this, we introduce RefineBench, a benchmark of 1,000 challenging problems across 11 domains paired with a checklist-based evaluation framework. We evaluate two refinement modes: (1) guided refinement, where an LM is provided natural language feedback, and (2) self-refinement, where LMs attempt to improve without guidance. In the self-refinement setting, even frontier LMs such as Gemini 2.5 Pro and GPT-5 achieve modest baseline scores of 31.3% and 29.1%, respectively, and most models fail to consistently improve across iterations (e.g., Gemini-2.5-Pro gains only +1.8%, while DeepSeek-R1 declines by -0.1%). By contrast, in guided refinement, both proprietary LMs and large open-weight LMs (>70B) can leverage targeted feedback to refine responses to near-perfect levels within five turns. These findings suggest that frontier LMs require breakthroughs to self-refine their incorrect responses, and that RefineBench provides a valuable testbed for tracking progress.

Reasoning training incentivizes LLMs to produce long chains of thought (long CoT), which among other things, allows them to explore solution strategies with self-checking. This results in higher accuracy, but inflates context length, token/compute cost, and answer latency. We ask: Can current models leverage their metacognition to provide other combinations on this Pareto frontier, e.g., better accuracy with lower context length and/or latency? Abstractly, we view the model as an improvement operator on its own "thoughts" with a continuum of possible strategies. We identify an interesting inference family Parallel-Distill-Refine (PDR), which performs the following: (i) generate diverse drafts in parallel; (ii) distill them into a bounded, textual workspace; and (iii) refine conditioned on this workspace, producing an output that seeds the next round. Importantly, context length (hence compute cost) is controllable via degree of parallelism, and is no longer conflated with the total number of generated tokens. We report PDR instantiations of current models that give better accuracy than long CoT while incurring lower latency. Setting degree of parallelism to 1 yields an interesting subcase, Sequential Refinement (SR) (iteratively improve a single candidate answer) which provides performance superior to long CoT. Success of such model orchestrations raises the question whether further training could shift the Pareto frontier. To this end, we train an 8B thinking model with Reinforcement Learning (RL) to make it consistent with PDR as the inference method. On math tasks with verifiable answers, iterative pipelines surpass single-pass baselines at matched sequential budgets, with PDR delivering the largest gains (e.g., +11% on AIME 2024 and +9% on AIME 2025).

The recent advancement of large language models (LLMs) has been achieved through a combo of instruction tuning and human alignment. However, building manually crafted instruction datasets and performing human alignment become the bottleneck for scaling the development of LLMs. In this paper, we exploit the idea of leveraging AI models in lieu of humans as the teacher to train student LLMs. Our method is inspired by how human students refine their writing skills by following the rubrics and learning from the revisions offered by their tutors. Specifically, we employ a teacher LLM to create a curriculum for instruction tuning of the student LLM, namely Curriculum Instruction TunING (CITING). It encompasses two main steps: (1) the teacher LLM crafts the rubrics for evaluating the answers corresponding to various types of questions, and (2) the student LLM learns to follow the rubrics and perform self-correction from the revision made by the teacher. We further iteratively carry out it to embody the procedure of CITING. We compare CITING to a series of state-of-the-art baselines on four datasets. Our method demonstrates strong improvement in terms of articulate, in-depth, and comprehensive by GPT-4 evaluation. Specifically, it achieves an average winning rate of 79.4% over SFT, 73.4% over RLHF, 78.1% over RRHF, and 76.3% over RAFT, respectively.

Automatic academic paper-to-slide generation is inherently iterative, because creating an effective presentation requires repeated cycles of generation, critique, and revision. Recent multi-agent systems partially acknowledge this through internal critique-and-revise loops, while conversational approaches allow users to refine generated slide decks through dialog. However, these refinement processes either remain largely closed to the user or introduce feedback only after a complete deck has been produced, limiting the user's ability to participate in the iterative refinement of narrative flow, content allocation, and presentation emphasis. To address this gap, we introduce ConvDeck, a multi-agent pipeline for conversational paper-to-slide generation that distributes interaction across the pipeline through stage-specific loops, allowing users to iteratively refine both the presentation outline and the final slide deck at the stages where each kind of decision is made. These loops are driven by a refinement mechanism in which agents can think, speak, and act, enabling them to either directly apply edits or respond conversationally to clarify user feedback and discuss revision options. Our evaluation shows that stage-specific conversational feedback improves user-goal satisfaction while preserving narrative coherence, content quality, and visual presentation.

Large language models (LLMs) have become increasingly capable of following instructions and complex reasoning, making prompting a flexible interface for adapting models without parameter updates. Yet prompt design remains labor-intensive and highly sensitive to formatting, phrasing, and instruction order, motivating automated prompt optimization methods that reduce manual effort while preserving inference-time flexibility. However, existing methods often search over prompt candidates or use fixed critique-refine pipelines driven by individual examples or small batches, limiting their ability to capture systematic error patterns and make targeted edits grounded in failure history. We propose Reflective Prompt Tuning (RPT), a framework that uses LLM function calling to simulate the iterative workflow of human prompt engineers. An LLM optimizer calls a diagnostic function that evaluates the target model over an entire optimization set, summarizes recurring failure modes, and returns a structured diagnostic report. The optimizer uses this report, together with an accumulated memory of prior reports, to revise the prompt for the next iteration. RPT further supports confidence-aware optimization by using calibration signals in diagnostic feedback and final prompt selection. Across three reasoning tasks, RPT improves over initial prompts by up to 12.9 points, remains competitive with state of the art, and improves confidence calibration. Our analyses show that RPT is especially effective on multi-hop and mathematical reasoning, producing targeted prompt revisions that align with diagnosed failure patterns and lead to gains in task performance and calibration.

As large language models enter professional domains, they must satisfy domain constraints, include critical evidence, and provide complete reasoning rather than merely produce fluent responses. Existing post-training methods often rely on holistic preferences or outcome-level verification, while recent rubric-based methods usually generate rubrics independently for each query. In specialized domains, such unconstrained rubrics may omit critical requirements and vary across samples, hindering the diagnosis and targeted repair of persistent capability deficiencies. We propose APTER (Adaptive Post-Training with Expert-Grounded Rubrics), a framework that integrates structured domain knowledge into fine-grained evaluation, optimization, and diagnosis for specialized complex reasoning. First, expert-grounded rubric construction starts from an expert criteria framework built by domain experts, where each criterion represents a stable professional capability. For each query, APTER selects relevant criteria and instantiates them into query-level rubrics linked to their source criteria, turning reusable expert criteria into executable query-level supervision without reference answers. Second, adaptive post-training uses rubric verdicts as both optimization and criterion-level diagnostic signals. Aggregating low-scoring verdicts by criterion ID reveals persistent deficiencies and triggers targeted supervised fine-tuning updates during reinforcement learning. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and medical question answering show consistent gains across both domains. Across three model generations, APTER improves the mathematics and medical averages over the corresponding base models by up to 15.86 and 8.04 points, respectively. Code and rubric datasets are available at https://github.com/AntDT-APTER/APTER.

Rubrics have emerged as an alternative to RLVR in open-ended domains where a single ground-truth final answer is not available. Existing rubric-based training methods rely on an LLM verifier that scores each rollout against rubrics. This introduces substantial training-time overhead, exposes optimization to verifier-specific biases, and reduces rubric feedback to a sparse end-of-trajectory signal. We propose Rubric-Guided Self-Distillation (RGSD), a verifier-free training method in which the base policy, conditioned on the rubric, serves as the teacher for the unconditioned student. RGSD distills the rubric-conditioned teacher distribution into the student token-by-token, replacing sparse trajectory-level rewards with dense per-token learning signals and removing the LLM judge from the training loop entirely. Across Qwen-2.5 (3B, 7B) and Qwen3-Thinking (4B, 8B) models on medical and science domains, RGSD achieves rubric satisfaction comparable to judge-based GRPO while using one on-policy rollout per prompt and no training-time verifier calls. Ablations show that raw rubrics provide a stronger teacher enrichment signal than self-generated reference responses, while a stronger GRPO judge can outperform RGSD in some settings, positioning RGSD as a complementary verifier-free alternative when verifier cost or reliability is the bottleneck.

Verifiable rewards have advanced reinforcement learning in mathematics and code. However, many valuable open-ended tasks share three properties: no automatic verifier of overall quality, multiple requirements to satisfy jointly, and multiple valid responses to each query. Training therefore needs feedback on requirement satisfaction across different valid responses. Rubric-based reinforcement learning provides this feedback by aggregating scores from explicit criteria. As learning progresses unevenly, some criteria become fully satisfied and lose discrimination while others remain informative. Dynamic methods revise shared rubrics or select evolving criteria to restore discrimination, but may also change useful criteria. To address this, we propose Reinforcement Learning with Adaptive Rubric Evolution (RARE). The core idea is to use current policy feedback to guide both which criteria change and what their replacements assess. Sample-level updates replace criteria fully satisfied across current outputs with checks of remaining quality differences, retaining all other criteria and scores. Within this rule, we compare rewarding desirable qualities with penalizing observed flaws. Video script generation exemplifies these properties and supports content production. Its demands for coherent, executable narratives under constraints make it a challenging testbed. Targeting flaws performs best across three video types with a mean gain of 3.82 points over matched static rubrics. Model and human preferences support these gains. Improvements also extend to writing and general generation benchmarks.

Aligning Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) requires reliable reward models, yet existing single-step evaluators can suffer from lazy judging, exploiting language priors over fine-grained visual verification. While rubric-based evaluation mitigates these biases in text-only settings, extending it to multimodal tasks is bottlenecked by the complexity of visual reasoning. The critical differences between responses often depend on instance-specific visual details. Robust evaluation requires dynamically synthesizing rubrics that isolate spatial and factual discrepancies. To address this, we introduce DeltaRubric, an approach that reformulates multimodal preference evaluation as a plan-and-execute process within a single MLLM. DeltaRubric operates in two steps: acting first as a Disagreement Planner, the model generates a neutral, instance-specific verification checklist. Transitioning into a Checklist Verifier, it executes these self-generated checks against the image and question to produce the final grounded judgment. We formulate DeltaRubric as a multi-role reinforcement learning problem, jointly optimizing planning and verification capabilities. Validated on Qwen3-VL 4B and 8B Instruct models, DeltaRubric achieves solid empirical gains. For instance, On VL-RewardBench, it improves base model overall accuracy by +22.6 (4B) and +18.8 (8B) points, largely outperforming standard no-rubric baselines. The results demonstrate that decomposing evaluation into structured, verifiable steps leads to more reliable and generalizable multimodal reward modeling.

To further enhance the ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to solve complex, multi-step reasoning problems, test-time scaling (TTS) methods have gained widespread attention. Existing approaches such as Best-of-N and majority voting are limited as their performance depends on the quality of candidate responses, making them unable to produce a correct solution when all candidates are incorrect. Introducing an additional model to select the best response also incurs significant deployment costs. To this end, we introduce Generative Self-Refinement (GSR), a novel parallel test-time scaling framework where a unified model first generates a set of candidate responses in parallel and then performs self-refinement to synthesize a new superior solution based on a prompt consisting of the problem and these candidates. However, LLMs struggle to perform refinement effectively when prompted directly. Therefore, we design a hybrid training pipeline by jointly optimizing for two complementary objectives, solving problems directly and refining candidate responses. Experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves state-of-the-art performance across five mathematical benchmarks. We further show that this learned self-refinement skill is a model-agnostic enhancement, robust across different model scales and generalizing to out-of-distribution reasoning tasks.

Training deep research agents, namely systems that plan, search, evaluate evidence, and synthesize long-form reports, pushes reinforcement learning beyond the regime of verifiable rewards. Their outputs lack ground-truth answers, their trajectories span many tool-augmented decisions, and standard post-training offers little mechanism for turning past attempts into reusable experience. In this work, we argue that rubrics should serve not merely as final-answer evaluators, but as the shared interface that structures policy execution, judge feedback, and agent memory. Based on this view, we introduce RubricEM, a rubric-guided reinforcement learning framework that combines stagewise policy decomposition with reflection-based meta-policy evolution. RubricEM first makes research trajectories stage-aware by conditioning planning, evidence gathering, review, and synthesis on self-generated rubrics. It then assigns credit with Stage-Structured GRPO, which uses stagewise rubric judgments to provide denser semantic feedback for long-horizon optimization. In parallel, RubricEM trains a shared-backbone reflection meta-policy that distills judged trajectories into reusable rubric-grounded guidance for future attempts. The resulting RubricEM-8B achieves strong performance across four long-form research benchmarks, outperforming comparable open models and approaching proprietary deep-research systems. Beyond final performance, we perform thorough analyses to understand the key ingredients of RubricEM.

Recent advances in large language models have made automatic game generation increasingly feasible, yet reliably improving generated games beyond a playable version remains challenging. Naive iterative refinement can easily overfit a small set of test cases, producing fragile games with unresolved bugs, missing behaviors, and poor generalization to broader player interactions. We introduce RSIGame, an autonomous agentic game development framework with recursive self-improvement. RSIGame organizes development into complementary local and global loops. Concretely, a local explore-diagnose-improve loop broadly explores the executable game, diagnoses and prioritizes discovered issues, and performs evidence-grounded revision, where an evolving checklist continually accumulates new testing and improvement guidance. A global loop tracks overall quality, preserves the best checkpoint, and detects saturation or regression over long-horizon development. Beyond test-time improvement, RSIGame further internalizes successful development experience into the generator through training. Across 140 GameCraft-Bench tasks, two game engines, and five generators, RSIGame consistently improves game quality under matched development budgets. Notably, experience internalization enables Qwen3.8-27B to reach 61.38 on Godot and 58.53 on Phaser, exceeding GPT-5.5 one-shot scores while reducing Qwen's generation tokens by 11 times.

ReAct-style agents for search-intensive, multi-step reasoning tasks rely largely on their own internal judgment to decide what evidence to seek, which reasoning or action step to take next, and when to stop, often producing shallow, redundant, or poorly targeted trajectories. Prior work has explored rubrics as external quality signals, but existing uses are mostly evaluative rather than action-guiding: rubrics typically serve as training-time rewards or post-hoc evaluators of completed outputs, and in deep-research settings they are often coarse-grained and report-level rather than step-level. We introduce Co-ReAct, a rubric-guided action-selection framework that uses rubrics as step-level guidance during inference. At each decision step, Co-ReAct injects a rubric into the agent's context to guide the next Reason-or-Act decision, specifying what the agent should target in evidence seeking, search, reasoning, or self-evaluation. To make this guidance reliable, we train a dedicated rubric generator with GRPO. Unlike prior pairwise or binary preference formulations, our objective optimizes a list-wise Spearman rank-correlation reward against multi-judge expert consensus rankings, encouraging rubrics that are discriminative rather than merely plausible. On DeepResearchBench and SQA-CS-V2, Co-ReAct consistently improves over ReAct and representative test-time compute baselines across search agents built on both 8B/14B open-source and frontier closed-source base models. The trained rubric generator can also serve as a drop-in component that improves these baselines without changing their underlying decision mechanisms. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/ZBWpro/Co-ReAct.

Standard reward models typically predict scalar scores that fail to capture the multifaceted nature of response quality in non-verifiable domains, such as creative writing or open-ended instruction following. To address this limitation, we propose Rubric-ARM, a framework that jointly optimizes a rubric generator and a judge using reinforcement learning from preference feedback. Unlike existing methods that rely on static rubrics or disjoint training pipelines, our approach treats rubric generation as a latent action learned to maximize judgment accuracy. We introduce an alternating optimization strategy to mitigate the non-stationarity of simultaneous updates, providing theoretical analysis that demonstrates how this schedule reduces gradient variance during training. Extensive experiments show that Rubric-ARM achieves state-of-the-art performance among baselines on multiple benchmarks and significantly improves downstream policy alignment in both offline and online reinforcement learning settings.

Pointwise reward modeling offers critical signals for LLM post-training, yet struggles with absolute scoring in subjective, non-verifiable settings. Rubric-based methods address this by decomposing evaluation into explicit criteria, but existing approaches typically depend on frontier LLMs and suffer from ties caused by hard Boolean aggregation. We present RUBRIC-ARROW, an alternating framework that jointly trains a rubric generator and a rubric-conditioned judge, with its RL stage using only pairwise preference data. Our method couples a probability-based scoring rule that reduces ties with phase-specific preference-based rewards and an alternating GRPO scheme that together train the pointwise evaluator. Extensive experiments show that RUBRIC-ARROW achieves competitive reward-modeling accuracy and yields consistent gains for downstream policy post-training.

The demand for synthetic data in mathematical reasoning has increased due to its potential to enhance the mathematical capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, ensuring the validity of intermediate reasoning steps remains a significant challenge, affecting data quality. While formal verification via theorem provers effectively validates LLM reasoning, the autoformalisation of mathematical proofs remains error-prone. In response, we introduce iterative autoformalisation, an approach that iteratively refines theorem prover formalisation to mitigate errors, thereby increasing the execution rate on the Lean prover from 60% to 87%. Building upon that, we introduce Theorem Prover as a Judge (TP-as-a-Judge), a method that employs theorem prover formalisation to rigorously assess LLM intermediate reasoning, effectively integrating autoformalisation with synthetic data generation. Finally, we present Reinforcement Learning from Theorem Prover Feedback (RLTPF), a framework that replaces human annotation with theorem prover feedback in Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). Across multiple LLMs, applying TP-as-a-Judge and RLTPF improves benchmarks with only 3,508 samples, achieving 5.56% accuracy gain on Mistral-7B for MultiArith, 6.00% on Llama-2-7B for SVAMP, and 3.55% on Llama-3.1-8B for AQUA.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated excellent performance in understanding human instructions and generating code, which has inspired researchers to explore the feasibility of generating RTL code with LLMs. However, the existing approaches to fine-tune LLMs on RTL codes typically are conducted on fixed datasets, which do not fully stimulate the capability of LLMs and require large amounts of reference data. To mitigate these issues , we introduce a simple yet effective iterative training paradigm named ITERTL. During each iteration, samples are drawn from the model trained in the previous cycle. Then these new samples are employed for training in this loop. Through this iterative approach, the distribution mismatch between the model and the training samples is reduced. Additionally, the model is thus enabled to explore a broader generative space and receive more comprehensive feedback. Theoretical analyses are conducted to investigate the mechanism of the effectiveness. Experimental results show the model trained through our proposed approach can compete with and even outperform the state-of-the-art (SOTA) open-source model with nearly 37\% reference samples, achieving remarkable 42.9\% and 62.2\% pass@1 rate on two VerilogEval evaluation datasets respectively. While using the same amount of reference samples, our method can achieved a relative improvement of 16.9\% and 12.5\% in pass@1 compared to the non-iterative method. This study facilitates the application of LLMs for generating RTL code in practical scenarios with limited data.

Automated paper reproduction has emerged as a promising approach to accelerate scientific research, employing multi-step workflow frameworks to systematically convert academic papers into executable code. However, existing frameworks often lack mechanisms to verify and refine the outputs at each generation step, or rely heavily on manually designed prompts for self-refinement, which limits their adaptability and scalability. To address these limitations, we propose a prompt-free collaborative agent framework that automatically enhances the quality of paper-to-code generation. Our approach employs two collaborative agents: a verification agent that examines whether the outputs at each step satisfy the requirements specified in the corresponding system prompt, and a refinement agent that revises the outputs based on the identified issues. Unlike previous methods that require human experts to craft specific refinement prompts for each step, our framework achieves automatic verification and improvement by leveraging only the original system prompts. We integrate our collaborative agents into the Paper2Code framework and conduct comprehensive experiments on PaperBench Code-Dev and Paper2CodeBench datasets. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach significantly improves the accuracy and completeness of reproduced code, achieving performance gains of approximately 15\% and 13\%, respectively, compared to the baseline without our agents. Furthermore, comparative experiments against Self-Refine validate the robustness and consistency of our prompt-free approach across different datasets.

Deep research agents are increasingly used to produce long-form financial reports, yet large-scale evaluation remains bottlenecked by the need for human experts to define and execute high-quality rubrics. We address this problem by proposing a scalable pipeline for generating high-quality rubrics without human experts in the final loop. We build a financial deep research benchmark from 104 real-world user queries and automatically synthesize 14,450 query-specific candidate rubrics from model-generated reports. To justify removing human experts from rubric execution, we compare rubric judgments from three human experts with those from a three-LLM judge panel on a sampled subset, and show that LLM-based evaluation is sufficiently consistent with human evaluation to replace it for large-scale rubric screening, including 98.67\% label-level agreement on jointly unanimous items. We then derive consensus-derived gold rubrics through two filters: a strict consistency filter, which keeps a rubric only if the three LLM judges unanimously agree on every report under the same query, and a distinguishability filter, which keeps a rubric only if it assigns at least one majority-yes and at least one majority-no label across the evaluated systems. This process retains 3,687 consistency-passed rubrics, of which 2,600 remain distinguishable and form the final set of consensus-derived gold rubrics. Using this final rubric set, we obtain clearly differentiated rankings across 10 deep research systems, with item-level pass rates ranging from 58.58\% to 22.23\%. More broadly, because the pipeline removes human-expert execution from rubric generation and evaluation, it is naturally scalable for benchmark evaluation, automatic system comparison, and future studies of evaluation-driven system improvement.

While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) mitigates hallucination and knowledge staleness in Large Language Models (LLMs), existing frameworks often falter on complex, multi-hop queries that require synthesizing information from disparate sources. Current advanced RAG methods, employing iterative or adaptive strategies, lack a robust mechanism to systematically identify and fill evidence gaps, often propagating noise or failing to gather a comprehensive context. We introduce FAIR-RAG, a novel agentic framework that transforms the standard RAG pipeline into a dynamic, evidence-driven reasoning process. At its core is an Iterative Refinement Cycle governed by a module we term Structured Evidence Assessment (SEA). The SEA acts as an analytical gating mechanism: it deconstructs the initial query into a checklist of required findings and audits the aggregated evidence to identify confirmed facts and, critically, explicit informational gaps. These gaps provide a precise signal to an Adaptive Query Refinement agent, which generates new, targeted sub-queries to retrieve missing information. This cycle repeats until the evidence is verified as sufficient, ensuring a comprehensive context for a final, strictly faithful generation. We conducted experiments on challenging multi-hop QA benchmarks, including HotpotQA, 2WikiMultiHopQA, and MusiQue. In a unified experimental setup, FAIR-RAG significantly outperforms strong baselines. On HotpotQA, it achieves an F1-score of 0.453 -- an absolute improvement of 8.3 points over the strongest iterative baseline -- establishing a new state-of-the-art for this class of methods on these benchmarks. Our work demonstrates that a structured, evidence-driven refinement process with explicit gap analysis is crucial for unlocking reliable and accurate reasoning in advanced RAG systems for complex, knowledge-intensive tasks.

Aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) for open-ended tasks is challenging because responses must satisfy multidimensional criteria without following a single correct generation trajectory. Existing rubric-based reinforcement learning (RL) methods compress fine-grained criterion-level feedback into scalar rewards, making persistent capability gaps difficult to target under limited on-policy exploration. We propose RISE-RL (Rubric-Informed Selective Exploration), which uses repeatedly missed rubric criteria to elicit privileged trajectories that are difficult to discover through unguided exploration alone. RISE-RL retains only trajectories whose complete-rubric reward exceeds the mean reward of natural rollouts, and then re-evaluates them under the original prompt to emphasize behaviors that remain weakly supported by the natural policy. The resulting guidance signal is optimized through a separate auxiliary objective and removed once its additional benefit diminishes. Experiments with 4B and 14B models across writing, chat, health, and science show that RISE-RL achieves the highest mean score on every evaluated benchmark under guidance-free evaluation. Compared with standard Rubric-RL, it improves the average score by 1.3 points at the 4B scale and 3.3 points at the 14B scale, including a 6.0-point gain on CreativeWriting-V3. It also improves creative-writing diversity and yields gains on objectively scored medical and scientific benchmarks. These results indicate that selective internalization through reward filtering and policy support shaping is effective for open-ended reinforcement learning.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for clinical decision support, where hallucinations and unsafe suggestions may pose direct risks to patient safety. These risks are particularly challenging as they often manifest as subtle clinical errors that evade detection by generic metrics, while expert-authored fine-grained rubrics remain costly to construct and difficult to scale. In this paper, we propose a retrieval-augmented multi-agent framework designed to automate the generation of instance-specific evaluation rubrics. Our approach grounds evaluation in authoritative medical evidence by decomposing retrieved content into atomic facts and synthesizing them with user interaction constraints to form verifiable, fine-grained evaluation criteria. Evaluated on HealthBench, our framework achieves a Clinical Intent Alignment (CIA) score of 60.12%, a statistically significant improvement over the GPT-4o baseline (55.16%). In discriminative tests, our rubrics yield a mean score delta (μ_Δ = 8.658) and an AUROC of 0.977, nearly doubling the quality separation achieved by GPT-4o baseline (4.972). Beyond evaluation, our rubrics effectively guide response refinement, improving quality by 9.2% (from 59.0% to 68.2%). This provides a scalable and transparent foundation for both evaluating and improving medical LLMs. The code is available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/Automated-Rubric-Generation-AF3C/.

Rubric-based Reinforcement Learning (RL) has emerged as a promising approach for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with complex, open-domain instruction following tasks. However, existing methods predominantly rely on response-level rewards, introducing severe reward sparsity and reward ambiguity problems. To address these issues, we propose Rubrics to Tokens (RTT), a novel rubric-based RL framework that bridges coarse response-level scores and fine-grained token-level credit assignment. RTT introduces a Token-Level Relevance Discriminator to predict which tokens in the response are responsible for a specific constraint, and optimizes the policy model via RTT-GRPO, which integrates response-level and token-level advantages within a unified framework. Furthermore, when transitioning from one-dimensional, outcome-level reward to three-dimensional reward space in the token-level rubric-based RL, we propose a novel group normalization method, called Intra-sample Token Group Normalization, to accommodate this shift. Extensive experiments and benchmarks demonstrate that RTT consistently outperforms other baselines in both instruction- and rubric-level accuracy across different models.

Large Language Models (LLMs) present an intriguing avenue for exploration in the field of formal theorem proving. Nevertheless, their full potential, particularly concerning the mitigation of hallucinations and refinement through prover error messages, remains an area that has yet to be thoroughly investigated. To enhance the effectiveness of LLMs in the field, we introduce the Lyra, a new framework that employs two distinct correction mechanisms: Tool Correction (TC) and Conjecture Correction (CC). To implement Tool Correction in the post-processing of formal proofs, we leverage prior knowledge to utilize predefined prover tools (e.g., Sledgehammer) for guiding the replacement of incorrect tools. Tool Correction significantly contributes to mitigating hallucinations, thereby improving the overall accuracy of the proof. In addition, we introduce Conjecture Correction, an error feedback mechanism designed to interact with prover to refine formal proof conjectures with prover error messages. Compared to the previous refinement framework, the proposed Conjecture Correction refines generation with instruction but does not collect paired (generation, error & refinement) prompts. Our method has achieved state-of-the-art (SOTA) performance on both miniF2F validation (48.0% -> 55.3%) and test (45.5% -> 51.2%). We also present 3 IMO problems solved by Lyra. We believe Tool Correction (post-process for hallucination mitigation) and Conjecture Correction (subgoal adjustment from interaction with environment) could provide a promising avenue for future research in this field.

Designing high-quality presentation slides can be challenging for non-experts due to the complexity involved in navigating various design choices. Numerous automated tools can suggest layouts and color schemes, yet often lack the ability to refine their own output, which is a key aspect in real-world workflows. We propose DesignLab, which separates the design process into two roles, the design reviewer, who identifies design-related issues, and the design contributor who corrects them. This decomposition enables an iterative loop where the reviewer continuously detects issues and the contributor corrects them, allowing a draft to be further polished with each iteration, reaching qualities that were unattainable. We fine-tune large language models for these roles and simulate intermediate drafts by introducing controlled perturbations, enabling the design reviewer learn design errors and the contributor learn how to fix them. Our experiments show that DesignLab outperforms existing design-generation methods, including a commercial tool, by embracing the iterative nature of designing which can result in polished, professional slides.

Computer Use Agents (CUAs) fundamentally rely on graphical user interface (GUI) grounding to translate language instructions into executable screen actions, but editing-level grounding in dense coding interfaces, where sub-pixel accuracy is required to interact with dense IDE elements, remains underexplored. Existing approaches typically rely on single-shot coordinate prediction, which lacks a mechanism for error correction and often fails in high-density interfaces. In this technical report, we conduct an empirical study of pixel-precise cursor localization in coding environments. Instead of a single-step execution, our agent engages in an iterative refinement process, utilizing visual feedback from previous attempts to reach the target element. This closed-loop grounding mechanism allows the agent to self-correct displacement errors and adapt to dynamic UI changes. We evaluate our approach across GPT-5.4, Claude, and Qwen on a suite of complex coding benchmarks, demonstrating that multi-turn refinement significantly outperforms state-of-the-art single-shot models in both click precision and overall task success rate. Our results suggest that iterative visual reasoning is a critical component for the next generation of reliable software engineering agents. Code: https://github.com/microsoft/precision-cua-bench.

Diffusion-based generative models have significantly advanced text-to-image generation but encounter challenges when processing lengthy and intricate text prompts describing complex scenes with multiple objects. While excelling in generating images from short, single-object descriptions, these models often struggle to faithfully capture all the nuanced details within longer and more elaborate textual inputs. In response, we present a novel approach leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) to extract critical components from text prompts, including bounding box coordinates for foreground objects, detailed textual descriptions for individual objects, and a succinct background context. These components form the foundation of our layout-to-image generation model, which operates in two phases. The initial Global Scene Generation utilizes object layouts and background context to create an initial scene but often falls short in faithfully representing object characteristics as specified in the prompts. To address this limitation, we introduce an Iterative Refinement Scheme that iteratively evaluates and refines box-level content to align them with their textual descriptions, recomposing objects as needed to ensure consistency. Our evaluation on complex prompts featuring multiple objects demonstrates a substantial improvement in recall compared to baseline diffusion models. This is further validated by a user study, underscoring the efficacy of our approach in generating coherent and detailed scenes from intricate textual inputs.

Reward modeling lies at the core of reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), yet most existing reward models rely on scalar or pairwise judgments that fail to capture the multifaceted nature of human preferences. Recent studies have explored rubrics-as-rewards (RaR) that uses structured natural language criteria that capture multiple dimensions of response quality. However, producing rubrics that are both reliable and scalable remains a key challenge. In this work, we introduce OpenRubrics, a diverse, large-scale collection of (prompt, rubric) pairs for training rubric-generation and rubric-based reward models. To elicit discriminative and comprehensive evaluation signals, we introduce Contrastive Rubric Generation (CRG), which derives both hard rules (explicit constraints) and principles (implicit qualities) by contrasting preferred and rejected responses. We further improve reliability by enforcing preference-label consistency via rejection sampling to remove noisy rubrics. Across multiple reward-modeling benchmarks, our rubric-based reward model, Rubric-RM, surpasses strong size-matched baselines by 6.8%. These gains transfer to policy models on instruction-following and biomedical benchmarks. Our results show that rubrics provide scalable alignment signals that narrow the gap between costly human evaluation and automated reward modeling, enabling a new principle-driven paradigm for LLM alignment.

Optimizing deployed AI systems increasingly amounts to editing prompts, skills, harnesses, and code rather than model weights. Existing approaches commonly optimize these artifacts through propose-evaluate-select procedures, where candidate configurations are evaluated and only those meeting an acceptance criterion are selected. Yet our analysis shows that discarded candidates often contain information critical for subsequent optimization. Discarding them causes later proposals to revisit the same failure modes. We introduce Mara Chain, a refinement procedure that turns rejected candidates into stepping stones. Rather than discarding a rejected candidate, Mara Chain retains and iteratively refines it using evidence accumulated across preceding attempts. The procedure limits each refinement chain to a fixed depth and applies Pareto-filtered Top-N selection to bound the candidate pool. Across AppWorld skill optimization, TerminalBench 2.1 harness optimization, and MuSiQue retrieval-pipeline optimization, Mara Chain delivers greater task-performance gains with fewer rollouts. It outperforms GEPA, ACE, and SkillOpt-Lite by up to 20.5% in relative performance on AppWorld, reaching the target score with 65.5% fewer rollouts than GEPA. It improves the pass rate by 20.2 and 22.5 percentage points over AHE and Meta-Harness on TerminalBench 2.1, respectively, and improves MuSiQue test nDCG@10 and Recall@10 by 0.104 and 0.131 over a hand-written retrieval pipeline.

The LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm promises scalable rubric-based evaluation, yet aligning frozen black-box models with human standards remains a challenge due to inherent generation stochasticity. We reframe judge alignment as a criteria transfer problem and isolate three recurrent failure modes: rubric instability caused by prompt sensitivity, unverifiable reasoning that lacks auditable evidence, and scale misalignment with human grading boundaries. To address these issues, we introduce RULERS (Rubric Unification, Locking, and Evidence-anchored Robust Scoring), a compiler-executor framework that transforms natural language rubrics into executable specifications. RULERS operates by compiling criteria into versioned immutable bundles, enforcing structured decoding with deterministic evidence verification, and applying lightweight Wasserstein-based post-hoc calibration, all without updating model parameters. Extensive experiments on essay and summarization benchmarks demonstrate that RULERS significantly outperforms representative baselines in human agreement, maintains strong stability against adversarial rubric perturbations, and enables smaller models to rival larger proprietary judges. Overall, our results suggest that reliable LLM judging requires executable rubrics, verifiable evidence, and calibrated scales rather than prompt phrasing alone. Code is available at https://github.com/LabRAI/Rulers.git.

Recent visual autoregressive (AR) models have shown promising capabilities in text-to-image generation, operating in a manner similar to large language models. While test-time computation scaling has brought remarkable success in enabling reasoning-enhanced outputs for challenging natural language tasks, its adaptation to visual AR models remains unexplored and poses unique challenges. Naively applying test-time scaling strategies such as Best-of-N can be suboptimal: they consume full-length computation on erroneous generation trajectories, while the raster-scan decoding scheme lacks a blueprint of the entire canvas, limiting scaling benefits as only a few prompt-aligned candidates are generated. To address these, we introduce GridAR, a test-time scaling framework designed to elicit the best possible results from visual AR models. GridAR employs a grid-partitioned progressive generation scheme in which multiple partial candidates for the same position are generated within a canvas, infeasible ones are pruned early, and viable ones are fixed as anchors to guide subsequent decoding. Coupled with this, we present a layout-specified prompt reformulation strategy that inspects partial views to infer a feasible layout for satisfying the prompt. The reformulated prompt then guides subsequent image generation to mitigate the blueprint deficiency. Together, GridAR achieves higher-quality results under limited test-time scaling: with N=4, it even outperforms Best-of-N (N=8) by 14.4% on T2I-CompBench++ while reducing cost by 25.6%. It also generalizes to autoregressive image editing, showing comparable edit quality and a 13.9% gain in semantic preservation on PIE-Bench over larger-N baselines.

Open-ended generation tasks require outputs to satisfy diverse and often implicit task-specific evaluation rubrics. The sheer number of relevant rubrics leads to prohibitively high verification costs and incomplete assessments of a response, making reinforcement learning (RL) post-training with rubric-based rewards difficult to scale. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that often the best way to combine these rubrics into one single reward is also highly prompt-specific. We propose Reinforcement Learning with Adversarial Critic (RLAC), a post-training approach that addresses these challenges via dynamic rubric verification. Our approach employs a large language model (LLM) as a critic that dynamically identifies only the most likely failure modes (e.g., a factual error or unhandled edge case), which are then verified by an external validator to optimize both generator and critic jointly. By training both the generator and the critic, this game enhances the critic's error detection and the generator's output quality while reducing required verifications. Our experiments demonstrate that RLAC improves factual accuracy in text generation and correctness in code generation, while also outperforming exhaustive verification and reward model methods. We show that dynamic critics are more effective than fixed critics, showcasing the potential of RLAC for scaling RL post-training to free-form generation tasks.

Real-world image super-resolution (RWSR) is a long-standing problem as low-quality (LQ) images often have complex and unidentified degradations. Existing methods such as Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) or continuous diffusion models present their own issues including GANs being difficult to train while continuous diffusion models requiring numerous inference steps. In this paper, we propose an Iterative Token Evaluation and Refinement (ITER) framework for RWSR, which utilizes a discrete diffusion model operating in the discrete token representation space, i.e., indexes of features extracted from a VQGAN codebook pre-trained with high-quality (HQ) images. We show that ITER is easier to train than GANs and more efficient than continuous diffusion models. Specifically, we divide RWSR into two sub-tasks, i.e., distortion removal and texture generation. Distortion removal involves simple HQ token prediction with LQ images, while texture generation uses a discrete diffusion model to iteratively refine the distortion removal output with a token refinement network. In particular, we propose to include a token evaluation network in the discrete diffusion process. It learns to evaluate which tokens are good restorations and helps to improve the iterative refinement results. Moreover, the evaluation network can first check status of the distortion removal output and then adaptively select total refinement steps needed, thereby maintaining a good balance between distortion removal and texture generation. Extensive experimental results show that ITER is easy to train and performs well within just 8 iterative steps. Our codes will be available publicly.

Recent advances in general-purpose AI models and agentic systems have enabled them to perform some CAD tasks. A systematic assessment is now needed to establish what these systems can accomplish and how well their outputs meet engineering requirements. This paper presents an empirical study of GPT-6 Astra, a SOTA general-purpose AI model, across four basic CAD tasks: model understanding, generation, editing, and evaluation. We design test cases spanning different levels of complexity and engineering requirements. The results show that GPT-6 Astra can support multiple stages of CAD workflows, with successful outcomes in cases involving nontrivial geometric complexity. This suggests that general-purpose AI is beginning to offer practical value in almost all steps in CAD workflow. However, gaps remain between generating visually plausible geometry and producing valid, functional, and editable CAD models. Recurring errors in freeform geometry, parameter dependencies, and mating relationships between parts limit engineering usefulness. Agentic iterative refinement can improve results but does not consistently resolve critical errors; long completion times further constrain practical use.

Reliable rubric grading requires more than accurate score prediction. Each judgement must be grounded in the mark scheme and evidence from the student answer. Existing credit-assignment and intervention methods, primarily designed for self-contained reasoning tasks such as mathematics reasoning, struggle in this setting because they do not identify where grading reasoning goes wrong or how the model's belief about the final mark changes during reasoning. We propose Evidence-Diagnosed Intervention Training (EDIT), a two-phase framework for training more rubric-faithful LLM graders. First, EDIT-SFT locates problematic reasoning steps using internal model signals: posterior belief over the final mark and input-grounding scores. It then revises only these local steps with help from a rubric checklist. Second, EDIT-RL calibrates the grader with belief-guided reward shaping, penalising large harmful belief drifts while still allowing helpful exploration. Experiments on two real-world, multi-subject grading benchmarks demonstrate that EDIT consistently outperforms strong supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning baselines on both in-domain and out-of-domain splits, with ablation studies confirming that internal-state diagnostics drive these gains.

Rubric-based rewards offer a promising way to extend reinforcement learning (RL) for large language models beyond tasks with automatically verifiable answers. However, scaling rubric-based RL remains challenging: existing approaches often rely on expert-written rubrics and manually constructed question sets, while fixed task-level rubrics may fail to capture the evaluation requirements of individual questions. We propose ARES (Automated Rubric synthEsis for Scalable RL), a framework for automatically constructing rubric-based RL data at scale. Starting from raw pretraining documents, ARES converts source knowledge into self-contained question-answer pairs and co-generates question-specific weighted rubrics, enabling instance-level reward supervision for open-ended responses. To improve diversity and quality, ARES conditions generation on domain labels and persona information, and applies validation filters for question self-containment, answer faithfulness, and rubric validity. Using ARES, we construct 100K rubric-annotated instances across ten domains. Experiments on seven benchmarks show that rubric-based RL trained with ARES, outperforms continual pretraining, supervised fine-tuning, and binary-reward RL, with the largest gains on multi-dimensional open-ended tasks such as healthcare and instruction following.

This paper presents a novel iterative deep learning framework and apply it for document enhancement and binarization. Unlike the traditional methods which predict the binary label of each pixel on the input image, we train the neural network to learn the degradations in document images and produce the uniform images of the degraded input images, which allows the network to refine the output iteratively. Two different iterative methods have been studied in this paper: recurrent refinement (RR) which uses the same trained neural network in each iteration for document enhancement and stacked refinement (SR) which uses a stack of different neural networks for iterative output refinement. Given the learned uniform and enhanced image, the binarization map can be easy to obtain by a global or local threshold. The experimental results on several public benchmark data sets show that our proposed methods provide a new clean version of the degraded image which is suitable for visualization and promising results of binarization using the global Otsu's threshold based on the enhanced images learned iteratively by the neural network.

Reinforcement Learning (RL) has significantly advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) in verifiable domains, but aligning models for open-ended generation remains profoundly challenging due to the lack of definitive rewards. Current rubric-based RL methods mitigate this by employing explicit criteria; however, they rely heavily on static, human-annotated rubrics that inevitably cause policy lag, or expensive external proprietary models for dynamic updates. In this paper, we propose EvoRubric, a novel single-policy co-evolutionary RL framework that eliminates the reliance on static criteria and on external rubric generators. By unifying response generation and rubric generation under a single parameterized policy, EvoRubric dynamically alternates between a Reasoner and a Rubric Generator. To prevent reward hacking and ensure the reliability of generated signals, we introduce a multi-level verification pipeline featuring a meta-verifier, zero-variance pruning, and a Leave-One-Out peer consensus mechanism. Validated criteria are dynamically archived into a memory pool, yielding dense, multi-objective rewards to continuously co-optimize both roles. Extensive experiments across Medical, Writing, and Science domains demonstrate that EvoRubric consistently outperforms traditional static and external-LLM-driven alignment methods. Notably, our framework is compatible with human-expert priors. When initialized with expert-annotated rubrics, EvoRubric can further uncover novel, discriminative dimensions, achieving better performance than relying solely on static expert annotations.

While large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in formal theorem proving, current benchmarks fail to adequately measure library-grounded abstraction -- the ability to reason with high-level interfaces and reusable structures central to modern mathematics and software engineering. We introduce LeanCat, a challenging benchmark comprising 100 fully formalized category-theory tasks in Lean. Unlike algebra or arithmetic, category theory serves as a rigorous stress test for structural, interface-level reasoning. Our evaluation reveals a severe abstraction gap: the best state-of-the-art model solves only 12.0% of tasks at pass@4, with performance collapsing from 55.0% on Easy tasks to 0.0% on High-difficulty tasks, highlighting a failure in compositional generalization. To overcome this, we evaluate LeanBridge, a retrieval-augmented agent that employs a retrieve-generate-verify loop. LeanBridge achieves a peak success rate of 24.0% -- doubling the performance of the best static baseline. These results empirically demonstrate that iterative refinement and dynamic library retrieval are not merely optimizations but strict necessities for neuro-symbolic reasoning in abstract domains. LeanCat offers a compact, reusable testbed for tracking progress toward reliable, research-level formalization.

Large Language Models (LLMs) agents are increasingly pivotal for addressing complex tasks in interactive environments. Existing work mainly focuses on enhancing performance through behavior cloning from stronger experts, yet such approaches often falter in real-world applications, mainly due to the inability to recover from errors. However, step-level critique data is difficult and expensive to collect. Automating and dynamically constructing self-critique datasets is thus crucial to empowering models with intelligent agent capabilities. In this work, we propose an iterative self-training framework, Agent-R, that enables language Agent to Reflect on the fly. Unlike traditional methods that reward or penalize actions based on correctness, Agent-R leverages MCTS to construct training data that recover correct trajectories from erroneous ones. A key challenge of agent reflection lies in the necessity for timely revision rather than waiting until the end of a rollout. To address this, we introduce a model-guided critique construction mechanism: the actor model identifies the first error step (within its current capability) in a failed trajectory. Starting from it, we splice it with the adjacent correct path, which shares the same parent node in the tree. This strategy enables the model to learn reflection based on its current policy, therefore yielding better learning efficiency. To further explore the scalability of this self-improvement paradigm, we investigate iterative refinement of both error correction capabilities and dataset construction. Our findings demonstrate that Agent-R continuously improves the model's ability to recover from errors and enables timely error correction. Experiments on three interactive environments show that Agent-R effectively equips agents to correct erroneous actions while avoiding loops, achieving superior performance compared to baseline methods (+5.59%).

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated the capacity to improve summary quality by mirroring a human-like iterative process of critique and refinement starting from the initial draft. Two strategies are designed to perform this iterative process: Prompt Chaining and Stepwise Prompt. Prompt chaining orchestrates the drafting, critiquing, and refining phases through a series of three discrete prompts, while Stepwise prompt integrates these phases within a single prompt. However, the relative effectiveness of the two methods has not been extensively studied. This paper is dedicated to examining and comparing these two methods in the context of text summarization to ascertain which method stands out as the most effective. Experimental results show that the prompt chaining method can produce a more favorable outcome. This might be because stepwise prompt might produce a simulated refinement process according to our various experiments. Since refinement is adaptable to diverse tasks, our conclusions have the potential to be extrapolated to other applications, thereby offering insights that may contribute to the broader development of LLMs.

LLM agents increasingly adapt to recurring tasks by accumulating procedural knowledge in skills. These skills are lightweight, reusable textual artifacts that are loaded into the agent's context without weight updates. Recent methods refine skills through iterative task execution, failure diagnosis, and trajectory-guided text-space updates. However, existing frameworks lack explicit diagnosis--outcome feedback and treat deletion as a generic edit operation rather than a dedicated mechanism for consolidating accumulated knowledge. We introduce SkillProx, a proximal-gradient-inspired forward--backward framework that couples closed-loop diagnostic evolution with utility-aware proximal refinement. Motivated by a composite objective balancing task loss and skill complexity, the forward stage re-executes diagnosis-driven edits on the same task batch, rolls back regressions, and feeds measured outcomes into subsequent diagnoses. The backward stage decomposes the resulting skill into auditable knowledge units, estimates their contributions using a frozen leave-one-out utility audit, and applies validation-gated consolidation, demotion, or removal. Experiments on in-distribution and out-of-distribution benchmarks across multiple backbone LLMs show that SkillProx improves average accuracy by 3.0 percentage points over the strongest gradient-based baseline. Component ablations demonstrate the complementary effects of closed-loop diagnosis and proximal refinement.

Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a prevailing paradigm for enhancing reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, relying solely on outcome supervision risks reward hacking, where models learn spurious reasoning patterns to satisfy final answer checks. While recent rubric-based approaches offer fine-grained supervision signals, they suffer from high computational costs of instance-level generation and inefficient training dynamics caused by treating all rubrics as equally learnable. In this paper, we propose Stratified Rubric-based Curriculum Learning (RuCL), a novel framework that reformulates curriculum learning by shifting the focus from data selection to reward design. RuCL generates generalized rubrics for broad applicability and stratifies them based on the model's competence. By dynamically adjusting rubric weights during training, RuCL guides the model from mastering foundational perception to tackling advanced logical reasoning. Extensive experiments on various visual reasoning benchmarks show that RuCL yields a remarkable +7.83% average improvement over the Qwen2.5-VL-7B model, achieving a state-of-the-art accuracy of 60.06%.

Recent work has shown that inference-time reasoning and reflection can improve text-to-image generation without retraining. However, existing approaches often rely on implicit, holistic critiques or unconstrained prompt rewrites, making their behavior difficult to interpret, control, or stop reliably. In contrast, large language models have benefited from explicit, structured forms of **thinking** based on verification, targeted correction, and early stopping. We introduce CRAFT (Continuous Reasoning and Agentic Feedback Tuning), a training-free and model-agnostic framework for multimodal image generation. CRAFT transforms a user prompt into a set of explicit, dependency-structured visual constraints, verifies generated images using a vision-language model, and performs targeted prompt updates only when specific constraints are violated. This iterative process includes an explicit stopping criterion, resulting in an interpretable and controllable inference-time refinement loop. Across multiple model families and challenging benchmarks, CRAFT consistently improves compositional accuracy, text rendering, and preference-based evaluations, with particularly strong gains for lightweight generators. Importantly, these improvements incur only a negligible inference-time overhead, allowing smaller or cheaper models to approach the quality of substantially more expensive systems. Our results suggest that explicitly structured, constraint-driven inference-time reasoning is a key ingredient for improving the reliability of multimodal generative models.

Expert-written natural language skills can improve tool-using agents, yet agent-authored skills perform 8-11 points worse than using no skill. This gap suggests that following procedural guidance and improving it from execution evidence are distinct capabilities. Inference time loops can repair skills but do not improve the model that writes the next one. We study how to organize execution experience from intermediate skills into training states for an optimizer. We introduce WER (Write, Execute, and Refine), a multi-phase framework that trains a Skill Optimizer outside a frozen executor. The optimizer proposes skills, a frozen agent executes each repeatedly, and a programmatic verifier scores the outcomes. The scores provide relative credit and select mixed-outcome records. Matched successful and failed trajectories from these records form the next phase's refinement states, so the optimizer learns from the consequences of its earlier outputs. On BFCL v4 multi-turn and tau2-bench, WER improves average Pass@1 over the no-skill baseline by 7.80 and 3.85 points, respectively. Under an identical refinement workflow, it outperforms the same backbone without optimizer training by 9.35 and 10.29 points. The trained 4B optimizer reaches 76.63 percent on BFCL v4, outperforming all evaluated off-the-shelf general-purpose models used as skill optimizers on average.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown substantial advances through reinforcement learning (RL), particularly in domains where rewards can be programmatically verified, such as mathematics and code. In these areas, models benefit from a well-defined operational base guided by explicit rule-based objectives. However, this progress reveals a significant limitation: in open-ended domains where rewards are ambiguous, subjective, or context-dependent, such as creative writing, scientific reasoning, and notably medical consultation, robust reward functions are lacking, making these areas challenging for current RL strategies. To bridge this gap, we introduce ORBIT, an open-ended rubric-based incremental training framework specifically designed for high-stakes medical dialogue. ORBIT integrates syn- thetic dialogue generation with the dynamic creation of rubrics, employing these rubrics to direct an incremental RL process. In particular, this approach does not depend on external medical knowledge or manual rules, instead utilizing rubric-guided feedback to shape learning. When implemented on the Qwen3-4B-Instruct model, our method can greatly enhance its performance on the HealthBench-Hard benchmark from 7.0 to 27.2 using only 2k samples, thus achieving state-of-the-art results for models of this scale. Our analysis confirms that rubric-driven RL fos-ters consistent performance gains across diverse consultation scenarios, going beyond simple numerical improvements. These findings underscore rubric-based feedback as a scalable strategy for advancing LLMs in intricate, open-ended tasks.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved impressive performance on code generation. Although prior studies enhanced LLMs with prompting techniques and code refinement, they still struggle with complex programming problems due to rigid solution plans. In this paper, we draw on pair programming practices to propose PairCoder, a novel LLM-based framework for code generation. PairCoder incorporates two collaborative LLM agents, namely a Navigator agent for high-level planning and a Driver agent for specific implementation. The Navigator is responsible for proposing promising solution plans, selecting the current optimal plan, and directing the next iteration round based on execution feedback. The Driver follows the guidance of Navigator to undertake initial code generation, code testing, and refinement. This interleaved and iterative workflow involves multi-plan exploration and feedback-based refinement, which mimics the collaboration of pair programmers. We evaluate PairCoder with both open-source and closed-source LLMs on various code generation benchmarks. Extensive experimental results demonstrate the superior accuracy of PairCoder, achieving relative pass@1 improvements of 12.00%-162.43% compared to prompting LLMs directly.

Current benchmarks for AI clinician systems, often based on multiple-choice exams or manual rubrics, fail to capture the depth, robustness, and safety required for real-world clinical practice. To address this, we introduce the GAPS framework, a multidimensional paradigm for evaluating Grounding (cognitive depth), Adequacy (answer completeness), Perturbation (robustness), and Safety. Critically, we developed a fully automated, guideline-anchored pipeline to construct a GAPS-aligned benchmark end-to-end, overcoming the scalability and subjectivity limitations of prior work. Our pipeline assembles an evidence neighborhood, creates dual graph and tree representations, and automatically generates questions across G-levels. Rubrics are synthesized by a DeepResearch agent that mimics GRADE-consistent, PICO-driven evidence review in a ReAct loop. Scoring is performed by an ensemble of large language model (LLM) judges. Validation confirmed our automated questions are high-quality and align with clinician judgment. Evaluating state-of-the-art models on the benchmark revealed key failure modes: performance degrades sharply with increased reasoning depth (G-axis), models struggle with answer completeness (A-axis), and they are highly vulnerable to adversarial perturbations (P-axis) as well as certain safety issues (S-axis). This automated, clinically-grounded approach provides a reproducible and scalable method for rigorously evaluating AI clinician systems and guiding their development toward safer, more reliable clinical practice.

Rubric-augmented verification guides reward models with explicit evaluation criteria, yielding more reliable judgments than single-model verification. However, most existing methods require costly rubric annotations, limiting scalability. Moreover, we find that rubric generation is vulnerable to a failure of cooperation; low-quality rubrics actively mislead reward models rather than help. Inspired by the principle of cooperative communication, we propose Cooperative yet Critical reward modeling (C2), a framework that significantly improves reward model judgments by having the reward model critically collaborate with a rubric generator trained solely from binary preferences. In C2, we synthesize helpful and misleading rubric pairs by measuring how each rubric shifts the reward model toward or away from the correct preference. Using these contrastive pairs, we train a cooperative rubric generator to propose helpful rubrics, and a critical verifier to assess rubric validity before making its judgment, following only rubrics it deems helpful at inference time. C2 outperforms reasoning reward models trained on the same binary preferences, with gains of up to 6.5 points on RM-Bench and 6.0 points length-controlled win rate on AlpacaEval 2.0. Without external rubric annotations, C2 enables an 8B reward model to match performance achieved with rubrics from a 4times larger model. Overall, our work demonstrates that eliciting deliberate cooperation in rubric-augmented verification makes reward models more trustworthy in a scalable way.

Generating Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) code from natural-language instructions is an open-ended task without absolute visual ground truth, leaving both evaluation and policy optimization without a faithful signal. Scalar metrics (CLIP, Aesthetic) calibrated on natural images transfer poorly to stylized vector content, and reusing them as RL rewards triggers reward hacking. We address both limitations with rubric-based scoring. We first establish empirically that prompting a vision-language judge with a multi-axis rubric correlates with human judgments far better than scalar metrics, both across samples and within instructions. Building on this finding, we introduce RULER (Instance-aware Rubric Rewards for Reinforcement Learning), which converts each instruction into an instance-aware rubric of six items spanning semantic, visual, and stylistic axes; a judge VLM scores rendered rollouts item-by-item, and the weighted satisfactions form a fine-grained reward optimized via Group Relative Policy Optimization. Because the rubric is derived from text alone, RULER requires neither paired SVG ground truth nor human preference labels. On MMSVG-Illustration and MMSVG-Icon, RULER lifts the rubric score from 0.432/0.395 to 0.693/0.683, surpassing dedicated SVG specialists and matching the substantially larger DeepSeek-V3, with ablations identifying rubric design as the active lever for RL on open-ended SVG generation. The project page is available at https://hangyuran.github.io/RULER/.

Despite significant advancements, current large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (LVLMs) continue to struggle with complex, multi-step, cross-modal common sense reasoning tasks, often exhibiting a lack of "deliberative thinking." They tend to rely on superficial associations rather than deep, chained inference, particularly when integrating visual information with abstract concepts. To address this, we propose the Coherent Multimodal Reasoning Framework (CMRF), a novel approach that enhances LVLMs' common sense reasoning capabilities through an iterative, self-evaluating inference mechanism. CMRF mimics human problem-solving by decomposing complex queries, generating step-by-step inferences, and self-correcting errors. Our framework integrates three key modules: a Reasoning Decomposition Unit (RDU) for breaking down problems into sub-questions, a Contextual Inference Engine (CIE) for contextual inference, and a Coherence Assessment Module (CAM) for evaluating logical consistency and confidence. Coupled with an Adaptive Iterative Refinement strategy, CMRF systematically refines its reasoning paths. Built upon LLaVA-1.6-34B and trained on a novel Multimodal Daily Activity Reasoning (MDAR) dataset, CMRF achieves state-of-the-art performance among open-source LVLMs on challenging benchmarks like VCR, A-OKVQA, and DailyLife-MRC. It attains an average accuracy of 69.4%, surpassing the best open-source baseline by +2.4 percentage points, with particular strength in complex reasoning scenarios. Extensive ablation studies and human evaluations confirm the critical contributions of each module and the effectiveness of iterative refinement in fostering more coherent and accurate reasoning.

Reinforcement Learning from Verifiable Rewards (RLVR) has emerged as a powerful paradigm for enhancing Large Language Models (LLMs), exemplified by the success of OpenAI's o-series. In RLVR, rewards are derived from verifiable signals-such as passing unit tests in code generation or matching correct answers in mathematical reasoning. While effective, this requirement largely confines RLVR to domains with automatically checkable outcomes. To overcome this, we extend the RLVR paradigm to open-ended tasks by integrating rubric-based rewards, where carefully designed rubrics serve as structured, model-interpretable criteria for automatic scoring of subjective outputs. We construct, to our knowledge, the largest rubric reward system to date, with over 10,000 rubrics from humans, LLMs, or a hybrid human-LLM collaboration. Implementing rubric-based RL is challenging; we tackle these issues with a clear framework and present an open-sourced Qwen-30B-A3B model with notable gains: 1) With only 5K+ samples, our system improves by +5.2% on open-ended benchmarks (especially humanities), outperforming a 671B DeepSeek-V3 model by +2.4%, while preserving general and reasoning abilities. 2) Our method provides fine-grained stylistic control, using rubrics as anchors to mitigate the "AI-like" tone and produce more human-like, expressive responses. We share key lessons in rubric construction, data selection, and training, and discuss limitations and future releases.

We explore the use of expert iteration in the context of language modeling applied to formal mathematics. We show that at same compute budget, expert iteration, by which we mean proof search interleaved with learning, dramatically outperforms proof search only. We also observe that when applied to a collection of formal statements of sufficiently varied difficulty, expert iteration is capable of finding and solving a curriculum of increasingly difficult problems, without the need for associated ground-truth proofs. Finally, by applying this expert iteration to a manually curated set of problem statements, we achieve state-of-the-art on the miniF2F benchmark, automatically solving multiple challenging problems drawn from high school olympiads.

Text-space optimization adapts large language models (LLMs) by editing external natural-language artifacts rather than model weights, so the optimized artifacts remain inspectable and the model can be treated as a black box. However, most existing text-space methods keep evaluation fixed. On open-ended tasks, this can become a bottleneck: once the solver improves on the criteria a rubric measures, omitted dimensions remain invisible to the optimization signal. Simply evolving the rubric is also unreliable when updates are selected by the current solver's score, because apparent progress can come from making the rubric easier to satisfy. We introduce DecoEvo (Decoupled Co-Evolution), which co-evolves a solver skill and a rubric-generator skill under decoupled objectives without using gold rubrics during optimization. The solver skill is updated using criterion-level feedback, while the rubric-generator skill is revised through complementary audits of requirement coverage and response discrimination that are independent of aggregate solver score. This separation focuses generator updates on newly exposed solver weaknesses, reducing repeated emphasis on criteria the solver already satisfies. Under each benchmark's official evaluation, DecoEvo outperforms all compared methods across five benchmarks and three LLM backbones, yielding 2.8--5.0\% relative gains over SkillOpt in the five-benchmark average.

Autoformalization, which translates natural language mathematics into machine-verifiable formal statements, is critical for using formal mathematical reasoning to solve math problems stated in natural language. While Large Language Models can generate syntactically correct formal statements, they often fail to preserve the original problem's semantic intent. This limitation arises from the LLM approaches' treating autoformalization as a simplistic translation task which lacks mechanisms for self-reflection and iterative refinement that human experts naturally employ. To address these issues, we propose ReForm, a Reflective Autoformalization method that tightly integrates semantic consistency evaluation into the autoformalization process. This enables the model to iteratively generate formal statements, assess its semantic fidelity, and self-correct identified errors through progressive refinement. To effectively train this reflective model, we introduce Prospective Bounded Sequence Optimization (PBSO), which employs different rewards at different sequence positions to ensure that the model develops both accurate autoformalization and correct semantic validations, preventing superficial critiques that would undermine the purpose of reflection. Extensive experiments across four autoformalization benchmarks demonstrate that ReForm achieves an average improvement of 17.2 percentage points over the strongest baselines. To further ensure evaluation reliability, we introduce ConsistencyCheck, a benchmark of 859 expert-annotated items that not only validates LLMs as judges but also reveals that autoformalization is inherently difficult: even human experts produce semantic errors in up to 38.5% of cases.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance on various quantitative reasoning and knowledge benchmarks. However, many of these benchmarks are losing utility as LLMs get increasingly high scores, despite not yet reaching expert performance in these domains. We introduce ARB, a novel benchmark composed of advanced reasoning problems in multiple fields. ARB presents a more challenging test than prior benchmarks, featuring problems in mathematics, physics, biology, chemistry, and law. As a subset of ARB, we introduce a challenging set of math and physics problems which require advanced symbolic reasoning and domain knowledge. We evaluate recent models such as GPT-4 and Claude on ARB and demonstrate that current models score well below 50% on more demanding tasks. In order to improve both automatic and assisted evaluation capabilities, we introduce a rubric-based evaluation approach, allowing GPT-4 to score its own intermediate reasoning steps. Further, we conduct a human evaluation of the symbolic subset of ARB, finding promising agreement between annotators and GPT-4 rubric evaluation scores.

There has been considerable divergence of opinion on the reasoning abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). While the initial optimism that reasoning might emerge automatically with scale has been tempered thanks to a slew of counterexamples, a wide spread belief in their iterative self-critique capabilities persists. In this paper, we set out to systematically investigate the effectiveness of iterative prompting of LLMs in the context of Graph Coloring, a canonical NP-complete reasoning problem that is related to propositional satisfiability as well as practical problems like scheduling and allocation. We present a principled empirical study of the performance of GPT4 in solving graph coloring instances or verifying the correctness of candidate colorings. In iterative modes, we experiment with the model critiquing its own answers and an external correct reasoner verifying proposed solutions. In both cases, we analyze whether the content of the criticisms actually affects bottom line performance. The study seems to indicate that (i) LLMs are bad at solving graph coloring instances (ii) they are no better at verifying a solution--and thus are not effective in iterative modes with LLMs critiquing LLM-generated solutions (iii) the correctness and content of the criticisms--whether by LLMs or external solvers--seems largely irrelevant to the performance of iterative prompting. We show that the observed increase in effectiveness is largely due to the correct solution being fortuitously present in the top-k completions of the prompt (and being recognized as such by an external verifier). Our results thus call into question claims about the self-critiquing capabilities of state of the art LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated and sometimes trained using automated graders such as LLM-as-judges that output scalar scores or preferences. While convenient, these approaches are often opaque: a single score rarely explains why an answer is good or bad, which requirements were missed, or how a system should be improved. This lack of interpretability limits their usefulness for model development, dataset curation, and high-stakes deployment. Query-specific rubric-based evaluation offers a more transparent alternative by decomposing quality into explicit, checkable criteria. However, manually designing high-quality, query-specific rubrics is labor-intensive and cognitively demanding and not feasible for deployment. While previous approaches have focused on generating intermediate rubrics for automated downstream evaluation, it is unclear if these rubrics are both interpretable and effective for human users. In this work, we investigate whether LLMs can generate useful, instance-specific rubrics as compared to human-authored rubrics, while also improving effectiveness for identifying good responses. Through our systematic study on two rubric benchmarks, and on multiple few-shot and post-training strategies, we find that off-the-shelf LLMs produce rubrics that are poorly aligned with human-authored ones. We introduce a simple strategy, RubricRAG, which retrieves domain knowledge via rubrics at inference time from related queries. We demonstrate that RubricRAG can generate more interpretable rubrics both for similarity to human-authored rubrics, and for improved downstream evaluation effectiveness. Our results highlight both the challenges and a promising approach of scalable, interpretable evaluation through automated rubric generation.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated significant potential in formal theorem proving, yet state-of-the-art performance often necessitates prohibitive test-time compute via massive roll-outs or extended context windows. In this work, we address this scalability bottleneck by exploiting an informative structure in formal verification: the observation that compilers map a vast space of diverse proof attempts to a compact set of structured failure modes. We introduce a learning-to-refine framework that leverages this compression to perform efficient learning and proof exploration. We perform tree search that corrects errors locally conditioned on explicit verifier feedback, thereby circumventing the costs associated with accumulating a long history of proof attempts. Extensive evaluations show that our method consistently amplifies the reasoning capabilities of base provers across varying scales. Notably, our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on PutnamBench among publicly reported sim8B and sim32B parameter models under comparable test-time budgets, offering a scalable paradigm for next-generation verifier-guided reasoning.

Pairwise human preference prediction is central to evaluating code-generation systems, where quality often depends on task-specific trade-offs beyond functional correctness. While rubric-based LLM judges improve interpretability by decomposing evaluation into explicit criteria, most existing pipelines remain pointwise: they score each response independently and derive preferences by comparing aggregated scores. We show that this design is poorly matched to pairwise code preference prediction and can underperform a strong monolithic judge. We propose CriterAlign, a criterion-centric framework that adapts rubric-based judging to pairwise preference evaluation through direct criterion-level pairwise judgments, tie-driven criterion refinement, swap-consistency filtering, and final pairwise synthesis. We further introduce Human-Preference-Aligned Guidance (HPAG), synthesized offline from training examples by extracting recurring rationale gaps between human preferences and monolithic judge predictions, and injected into the criterion generator, criterion judge, and final judge. On BigCodeReward, CriterAlign improves a Qwen2.5-VL-32B monolithic judge from 60.4% to 66.3% accuracy, with ablations confirming the contributions of pairwise criterion design and HPAG.

We introduce Reprompting, an iterative sampling algorithm that searches for the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) recipes for a given task without human intervention. Through Gibbs sampling, we infer CoT recipes that work consistently well for a set of training samples. Our method iteratively samples new recipes using previously sampled solutions as parent prompts to solve other training problems. On five Big-Bench Hard tasks that require multi-step reasoning, Reprompting achieves consistently better performance than the zero-shot, few-shot, and human-written CoT baselines. Reprompting can also facilitate transfer of knowledge from a stronger model to a weaker model leading to substantially improved performance of the weaker model. Overall, Reprompting brings up to +17 point improvements over the previous state-of-the-art method that uses human-written CoT prompts.

Visual agents for symbolic graphics reasoning depend on executable world representations, yet continued improvement remains bottlenecked by ambiguous supervision from final renders. Recent agentic systems refine scenes through repeated interaction, but they lack mechanisms to recursively extract actionable evidence from execution traces, overlooking which proposed symbolic edits survived, disappeared, or interfered during program execution. To address this, we propose VETR (Verified Execution Trajectories for Refinement), a framework that enables agentic recursive self-improvement over executable world representations for symbolic graphics reasoning. Within each task, VETR retains aligned program/render records with bounded runtime observations and introduces an execution refiner that compiles observed writes and state changes into constrained alternative programs. The refiner validates their endpoints and preservation conditions against captured runtime state; the ordinary visual verifier then assesses goal relevance. Repair construction makes no additional language-model calls, but can require additional executions. Evaluations on BlenderGym (280 tasks) and BlenderBench (27 released tasks) with GPT-5.6-luna and Qwen3.8-27B show that VETR consistently outperforms existing refinement strategies, including BlenderAlchemy and VIGA. Controlled ablations evaluate the contributions of execution refinement and role-asymmetric evidence organization under fixed generator-interaction caps.

We propose RefineSVG, a single-step closed-loop visual feedback framework that enables multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to perform high-fidelity image-to-SVG generation through self-correction. Existing MLLM-based approaches rely on single-pass open-loop inference, where the model receives visual input only once and must generate thousands of SVG code tokens without intermediate verification. This paradigm inevitably leads to geometric drift, error accumulation, and visual hallucination on complex images. RefineSVG overcomes this limitation by invoking an external rendering engine after an initial SVG generation pass to compare the rendered output against the target image. The comparison yields a multi-dimensional visual residual map (Diff-Map) that is fed back to the model as a ReAct-style correction signal, driving a targeted correction step. To support this render-observe-correct interaction, we further introduce an SVG-oriented semantic vocabulary that compresses token sequences by over 52%. A progressive training pipeline spanning supervised fine-tuning, rejection-sampling cold-start data construction, and end-to-end agentic reinforcement learning aligns the model with closed-loop visual correction. Extensive experiments show that RefineSVG consistently outperforms existing baselines in reconstruction fidelity, structural accuracy, and code efficiency.Code is available at https://github.com/liuxiaobo66/RefineSVG.

Since the emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) popularized by the release of GPT-3 and ChatGPT, LLMs have shown remarkable promise in programming-related tasks. While code generation using LLMs has become a popular field of research, code evaluation using LLMs remains under-explored. In this paper, we focus on LLM-based code evaluation and attempt to fill in the existing gaps. We propose multi-agentic novel approaches using question-specific rubrics tailored to the problem statement, arguing that these perform better for logical assessment than the existing approaches that use question-agnostic rubrics. To address the lack of suitable evaluation datasets, we introduce two datasets: a Data Structures and Algorithms dataset containing 150 student submissions from a popular Data Structures and Algorithms practice website, and an Object Oriented Programming dataset comprising 80 student submissions from undergraduate computer science courses. In addition to using standard metrics (Spearman Correlation, Cohen's Kappa), we additionally propose a new metric called as Leniency, which quantifies evaluation strictness relative to expert assessment. Our comprehensive analysis demonstrates that question-specific rubrics significantly enhance logical assessment of code in educational settings, providing better feedback aligned with instructional goals beyond mere syntactic correctness.

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at code generation, but ensuring their outputs to be functionally correct, especially in complex programming tasks, is a persistent challenge. While traditional Test-Driven Development (TDD) offers a path for code refinement, its efficacy with LLMs is often undermined by the scarcity of high-quality test cases or the pitfalls of automated test generation, including biased tests or inaccurate output predictions that can misdirect the correction process. This paper introduces Property-Generated Solver, a novel framework that leverages Property-Based Testing (PBT) to validate high-level program properties or invariants, instead of relying on specific input-output examples. These properties are often simpler to define and verify than directly predicting exhaustive test oracles, breaking the "cycle of self-deception" where tests might share flaws with the code they are meant to validate. Property-Generated Solver employs two collaborative LLM-based agents: a Generator dedicated to code generation and iterative refinement, and a Tester that manages the PBT life-cycle and formulate semantically rich feedback from property violations. The resulting comprehensive and actionable feedback then guides the Generator in its refinement efforts. By establishing PBT as the core validation engine within this iterative, closed-loop paradigm, Property-Generated Solver provides a robust mechanism for steering LLMs towards more correct and generalizable code. Extensive experimental results on multiple code generation benchmarks demonstrate that Property-Generated Solver achieves substantial pass@1 improvements, ranging from 23.1% to 37.3% relative gains over established TDD methods.

Advanced diffusion models like RPG, Stable Diffusion 3 and FLUX have made notable strides in compositional text-to-image generation. However, these methods typically exhibit distinct strengths for compositional generation, with some excelling in handling attribute binding and others in spatial relationships. This disparity highlights the need for an approach that can leverage the complementary strengths of various models to comprehensively improve the composition capability. To this end, we introduce IterComp, a novel framework that aggregates composition-aware model preferences from multiple models and employs an iterative feedback learning approach to enhance compositional generation. Specifically, we curate a gallery of six powerful open-source diffusion models and evaluate their three key compositional metrics: attribute binding, spatial relationships, and non-spatial relationships. Based on these metrics, we develop a composition-aware model preference dataset comprising numerous image-rank pairs to train composition-aware reward models. Then, we propose an iterative feedback learning method to enhance compositionality in a closed-loop manner, enabling the progressive self-refinement of both the base diffusion model and reward models over multiple iterations. Theoretical proof demonstrates the effectiveness and extensive experiments show our significant superiority over previous SOTA methods (e.g., Omost and FLUX), particularly in multi-category object composition and complex semantic alignment. IterComp opens new research avenues in reward feedback learning for diffusion models and compositional generation. Code: https://github.com/YangLing0818/IterComp

Procedural 3D modeling through code is emerging as a versatile paradigm, offering deterministic, engine-ready, and precisely editable assets that neural 3D generators inherently lack. Authoring such procedural content, however, demands deep expertise in 3D software APIs, parametric design, and code-level geometric reasoning. In this paper, we propose 3DCodeBench, a systematic benchmark for evaluating vision-language model (VLM) agents for procedural 3D generation in 3D modeling software. Specifically, 3DCodeBench evaluates how effectively 12 advanced VLMs can serve as procedural 3D modelers by translating text and image references into procedural code for 3D modeling software. Recognizing that automated metrics may not fully capture the perceptual quality of 3D shapes, we build 3DCodeArena, a ranking platform based on pairwise human preferences over generated 3D outputs. From extensive evaluations and results, we observe that: (1) Failures mostly arise from API mismatches, while successful renders still suffer from disconnected or floating 3D geometric components. (2) Test-time scaling, such as higher thinking budgets and multi-turn refinement, improves performance overall. Our findings highlight a critical need for high-quality procedural coding data to advance commercial VLMs. Furthermore, effective procedural 3D modeling requires a robust execution environment that provides high-fidelity feedback for iterative refinement. We release 3DCodeBench, including the curated large-scale dataset of multimodal (text/image) prompts, procedural code, 3D object triplets, evaluation protocol, and the public 3DCodeArena platform as a foundational toolkit for exploring VLM-based procedural 3D modelers.

Reward models are essential for aligning Large Language Models (LLMs) with human values, yet their development is hampered by costly preference datasets and poor interpretability. While recent rubric-based approaches offer transparency, they often lack systematic quality control and optimization, creating a trade-off between scalability and reliability. We address these limitations with a novel, training-free framework built on a key assumption: evaluation rubrics underlying human preferences exhibit significant generalization ability across diverse queries, a property that enables remarkable data efficiency. Our two-stage approach first infers high-quality, query-specific rubrics using a validation-guided Propose-Evaluate-Revise pipeline. Second, it generalizes these granular rubrics into a compact, non-redundant core set by maximizing an information-theoretic coding rate. The final output is an interpretable, hierarchical "Theme-Tips" rubric set. Extensive experiments demonstrate the framework's exceptional data efficiency and performance. Critically, using just 70 preference pairs (1.5\% of the source data), our method also empowers smaller models like Qwen3-8B to outperform specialized, fully-trained counterparts. This work pioneers a scalable, interpretable, and data-efficient path for reward modeling.