@inproceedings{su-etal-2026-crossing,
    title = "Crossing the Reward Bridge: Expanding Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards Across Diverse Domains",
    author = "Su, Yi  and
      Yu, Dian  and
      Song, Linfeng  and
      Li, Juntao  and
      Mi, Haitao  and
      Tu, Zhaopeng  and
      Zhang, Min  and
      Yu, Dong",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-long.178/",
    pages = "3872--3892",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
    abstract = "Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has been effective on tasks with structured solutions like math and coding, but its reliance on simple, rule-based verifiers creates a fundamental bottleneck. We find their applicability is surprisingly narrow even in structured domains, a limitation that is compounded at scale: rule-based systems can paradoxically degrade in performance as multi-domain, free-form training data increases. To overcome these challenges, we propose a new RLVR framework that uses a generative verifier to provide soft, probabilistic rewards. Our key insight is that powerful LLMs show high agreement with human evaluators when judging answer correctness given a ground-truth reference, allowing us to automate reward generation without costly human annotation. Our experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of this approach. We show that a compact 7B generative reward model can guide a 7B policy model to decisively outperform models up to 10x its size, including the 72B Qwen2.5-Instruct (by a margin of +8.6{\%}). This effectiveness is robust, holding true across diverse training datasets with answers sourced from experts, web users, and other LLMs, and generalizes strongly to seven out-of-distribution benchmarks. Our work provides a scalable and effective framework for extending RLVR beyond the limitations of pattern-based verification to complex, noisy, real-world domains."
}