RISED: RubrIcs for agentic multi-environment Selection and sElf-Distillation
cs.AI
Submitted: 2026-10-01
Updated: 2026-10-01
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Training a single LLM agent jointly across diverse interactive environments has attracted increasing attention as a route to generalist agents.
Terminology
Abstract
Training a single LLM agent jointly across diverse interactive environments has attracted increasing attention as a route to generalist agents. Existing curriculum and data-selection strategies often allocate training at the environment level or prioritize local reward-based signals, without explicitly considering relationships between current rollouts across environments for prompt-group selection. Meanwhile, as environments are learned at different rates, all-failure and all-success rollout groups can coexist within a batch, leaving those data without group-relative reward signals. Both challenges highlight limitations of relying solely on scalar rewards in multi-environment RL: they provide limited information about cross-environment relationships and no within-group reward contrast when rewards are identical. This motivates richer textual feedback, such as rubrics describing rollout behaviours, to guide learning. Beyond rubrics' usage as reward, we repurpose rubrics to guide both online data selection and policy supervision. An LLM judge tags each rollout using a predefined rubric vocabulary shared across environments. The resulting profiles guide the selection of data that aligns with the overall behavioural composition of the mixed-environment batch while limiting overlap with already-selected data. Available positive rubrics (describing desired behaviours) provide privileged context for an on-policy self-distillation teacher, supplying additional token-level supervision, while negative rubrics (describing undesired behaviours) guide subsequent rollout generation away from recurring failure modes. Together, these components form RISED. Across model backbones, RISED achieves the highest mean pass rate across environments and ranks first or second in every individual environment. Rubric-based analysis of RISED can further characterize the behavioural changes accompanying these gains.
Sources
- Unmasking On-Policy Distillation: Where It Helps, Where It Hurts, and Why
- Rubrics as Privileged Information for Open-Ended Generation
- Reinforcement Learning for Long-Horizon Interactive LLM Agents
- RubiCap: Rubric-Guided Reinforcement Learning for Dense Image Captioning
- Open Rubric System: Scaling Reinforcement Learning with Pairwise Adaptive Rubric
- VCRL: Variance-based Curriculum Reinforcement Learning for Large Language Models
- Uncovering Intrinsic Capabilities: A Paradigm for Data Curation in Vision-Language Models
- What and When to Distill: Selective Hindsight Distillation for Multi-Turn Agents
- Rethinking On-Policy Distillation of Large Language Models: Phenomenology, Mechanism, and Recipe
- Filter, Then Reweight: Rethinking Optimization Granularity in On-Policy Distillation
- MoDoMoDo: Multi-Domain Data Mixtures for Multimodal LLM Reinforcement Learning
- Paying Less Generalization Tax: A Cross-Domain Generalization Study of RL Training for LLM Agents
- Online Batch Selection for Faster Training of Neural Networks
- Self-Distilled Agentic Reinforcement Learning
- Llama-Nemotron: Efficient Reasoning Models
- Nemotron 3 Nano: Open, Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Hybrid Mamba-Transformer Model for Agentic Reasoning
- MagicAgent: Towards Generalized Agent Planning
- DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models
- Reinforcing Chain-of-Thought Reasoning with Self-Evolving Rubrics
- Not Every Rubric Teaches Equally: Policy-Aware Rubric Rewards for RLVR
Related papers
- MAVEN-T: Reinforced Heterogeneous Distillation for Real-Time Multi-Agent Trajectory Prediction
- Model Discovery Agent: LLM-assisted Bayesian experiment design for data-efficient discovery of mechanistic world models
- Agents' Last Exam
- The Clinician's Veto: Navigating Trust, Liability, and Uncertainty in Autonomous AI Prescribing
- MindHelper: Closed-Loop Embodied Mental-State Reasoning for Precision Intervention
- Incumbent Advantage: Brand Bias and Cognitive Manipulation Dynamics in LLM Recommendation Systems