Small language models (SLMs) are promising for real-world deployment due to their efficiency and low operational cost. However, their limited capacity struggles with high-stakes legal reasoning tasks that require coherent statute interpretation and logically consistent deduction. Furthermore, training SLMs for such tasks demands high-quality, concise reasoning trajectories, which are prohibitively expensive to manually collect and difficult to curate via standard rejection sampling, which lacks granularity beyond final verdicts. To address these challenges, we propose LegalDrill, a diagnosis-driven synthesis framework that extracts and iteratively refines reasoning trajectories from a capable teacher via fine-grained prompting, then a self-reflective verification is employed to adaptively select the most effective data for the SLM student. The resulting data empower SLM training through supervised fine-tuning and direct preference optimization. Extensive experiments on several legal benchmarks demonstrate that LegalDrill significantly bolsters the legal reasoning capabilities of representative SLMs while bypassing the need for scarce expert annotations, paving a scalable path toward practical legal reasoning systems.
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Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 6: Industry Track) · 2026 · 正式发表
Tianci Liu, Ran Xu Google DeepMind, Tony Yu DeepLab, Ilgee Hong Georgia Institute of Technology, Carl Yang Emory University, Tuo Zhao, Haoyu Wang State University of New York at Albany
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 criteria to 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 remove noisy rubrics via preserving preference–label consistency. Across multiple reward-modeling benchmarks, our rubric-based reward model, Rubric-RM, surpasses strong size-matched baselines by 8.4%. These gains transfer to policy models on instruction-following and biomedical benchmarks.The model weights and datasets are publicly available at https://huggingface.co/OpenRubrics.
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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