Yue Fang
Publications
EvoRubrics: Dynamic Rubrics as Rewards via Adversarial Co-Evolution for LLM Reinforcement Learning
Rubric-based rewards offer interpretable and fine-grained optimization signals for reinforcement learning in open-ended tasks where verifiable answers are unavailable. However, pre-constructed rubrics remain static throughout training, creating a fundamental mismatch with the evolving policy: fixed criteria gradually lose discriminative power as the model improves, leading to reward saturation and potential hacking. Recent dynamic rubric methods partially address this but rely on external frontier models or ground-truth answers, and update rubrics only at coarse granularity. We propose EvoRubrics, a co-evolutionary RL framework where a Policy LLM and a Rubric Generator jointly improve through adversarial interaction within each training step. As the policy improves under the rubric generator's guidance, the rubric generator adapts its criteria to remain discriminative and informative, enabling evaluation to track the policy in real time and naturally inducing an automatic curriculum. Experiments show that EvoRubrics consistently outperforms static and dynamic rubric baselines across benchmarks. The learned Rubric Generator further generalizes as a transferable reward model. Notably, even a fully self-supervised variant without any external supervision achieves meaningful gains, suggesting that co-evolution between generation and evaluation alone can provide sufficiently rich learning signals. Our code is publicly available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/EvoRubrics-2155/.
ScaffoldAgent: Utility-Guided Dynamic Outline Optimization for Open-Ended Deep Research
Open-ended deep research (OEDR) requires systems to acquire knowledge through multi-round retrieval and generate coherent long-form reports. The outline plays a central role as a structural scaffold that coordinates retrieval, evidence organization, and generation. However, existing methods either fix the outline before writing or refine it with local heuristics, leading to scaffold drift under continuous information accumulation and delayed feedback for evaluating outline modifications. We propose ScaffoldAgent, a utility-guided dynamic outline optimization framework for OEDR. ScaffoldAgent models outline evolution as a structured decision process with three operations: Expansion, Contraction, and Revision, enabling controlled updates to the report scaffold. It further introduces a utility-guided feedback mechanism that estimates the downstream value of each outline operation from retrieval gain, structural coherence, and trial-generation quality. The resulting utility signal guides node selection, operation scheduling, and termination during inference. Experiments on DeepResearch Bench and DeepResearch Gym show that ScaffoldAgent consistently improves long-form report generation and factual grounding over existing deep research agents.