Crossing the Reward Bridge: Expanding Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards Across Diverse Domains
Yi Su, Dian Yu Tencent AI Lab, Linfeng Song Google, Juntao Li, Haitao Mi Tencent AI Lab, Zhaopeng Tu Tencent, Min Zhang Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen and Harbin Institute of Technology, Dong Yu CapitalOne
Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been effective on tasks with structured solutions like math and coding, but its reliance on simple, rule-based verifiers creates a fundamental bottleneck. We find their applicability is surprisingly narrow even in structured domains, a limitation that is compounded at scale: rule-based systems can paradoxically degrade in performance as multi-domain, free-form training data increases. To overcome these challenges, we propose a new RLVR framework that uses a generative verifier to provide soft, probabilistic rewards. Our key insight is that powerful LLMs show high agreement with human evaluators when judging answer correctness given a ground-truth reference, allowing us to automate reward generation without costly human annotation. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. We show that a compact 7B generative reward model can guide a 7B policy model to decisively outperform models up to 10x its size, including the 72B Qwen2.5-Instruct (by a margin of +8.6%). This effectiveness is robust, holding true across diverse training datasets with answers sourced from experts, web users, and other LLMs, and generalizes strongly to seven out-of-distribution benchmarks. Our work provides a scalable and effective framework for extending RLVR beyond the limitations of pattern-based verification to complex, noisy, real-world domains.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表