RELAY: Selective Self-Distillation with Adaptive Hand-off for Rubric-Based Reinforcement Learning
Rubric-based reinforcement learning grades a response against many written criteria but collapses them into one reward, which discards the detail the rubric carries and gives no GRPO reward gradient when a group's responses tie. A frozen teacher that reads the rubric as privileged context provides token-level supervision, but we observe an early plateau in the gains over GRPO. RELAY uses advantages and rewards to select positive-advantage and low-scoring zero-advantage rollouts, and monitors the distillation loss to decide when to retire the teacher. Stage 1 combines selective distillation from a frozen teacher with GRPO; a plateau detector then removes the teacher, and Stage 2 continues ...
| Authors | Kunwang Zheng, Xinyu Sun, Yu Cao et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 13 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 14 October 2026 |
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