Scoring Higher, Answering Worse: Mitigating Reward Hacking in Rubric-Based RL via Protocol-Level Rubrics

Rubric-based reinforcement learning (Rubric-RL) trains language models where no verifier exists. A judge checks each criterion of a rubric, and the verdicts are aggregated into a reward, most often by a weighted sum. We show that this additive aggregation is the weak point. Under a sum, criteria com