DUAL RM: Beyond Rule-based Preference Reward Modeling via Meta-Reward
Xiaobo Liang, Wanfu Wang, Qipeng Huang, Yuyang Ding, Zecheng Tang Soochow University, Yixin Ji Soochow University, Qianben Chen ByteDance Inc., Zhe Zhao 等 11 位作者
The ability to model sparse and underspecified rewards, characteristic of human preferences, is fundamental to scaling Reinforcement Learning (RL). Current preference-based reward modeling largely relies on verifiable rewards, where human-annotated labels define rule-based signals. However, these methods face a fundamental bottleneck we term the Matryoshka Doll Problem: a recursive dependency where each reward verifier requires a meta-verifier, leading to continuous and costly dependence on human annotation. In this work, we propose Dual RM, which couples discriminative and generative reward models (DisRMs and GenRMs) under a non-parametric meta-reward. Rather than verifying the correctness of GenRM’s reasoning, the meta-reward evaluates its practical impact on response quality. Specifically, GenRM identifies multi-dimensional evaluation rubrics and iteratively refines the response, while DisRM quantifies the quality shifts induced by each rubric. Furthermore, we implement rubric-based test-time scaling to improve sample efficiency and preference alignment under both DPO and GRPO. Our experiments demonstrate that Dual RM achieves strong performance across major preference benchmarks. Notably, even when trained exclusively on language modality, it exhibits robust cross-modal transfer on Omni-RewardBench.
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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