Reinforcement Learning from Dynamic Critic Feedback for Free-Form Generations

ICLR 2026 Conference Submission23839 Authors

Keywords: large language model, reinforcement learning, dynamic critics, language model post-training, open-ended generation

TL;DR: A framework that uses dynamic LLM critics to identify failure modes for efficient rubric verification, enabling scalable reinforcement learning for open-ended generation tasks.

Abstract: 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 from Dynamic Critic Feedback (RLDCF), 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 RLDCF 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 RLDCF for scaling RL post-training to free-form generation tasks.

Primary Area: foundation or frontier models, including LLMs

Submission Number: 23839