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ACL Findings2026

AutoRubric: Rubric-Based Generative Rewards for Faithful Multimodal Reasoning

Mengzhao Jia, Zhihan Zhang, Ignacio Cases, Zheyuan Liu, Meng Jiang, Peng Qi

Abstract

Multimodal large language models (MLLMs) have rapidly advanced from perception tasks to complex multi-step reasoning, yet reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) often leads to spurious reasoning since only the final-answer correctness is rewarded.To address this limitation, we propose AutoRubric, a framework that integrates RLVR with process-level supervision through automatically collected rubric-based generative rewards.Our key innovation lies in a scalable self-aggregation method that distills consistent reasoning checkpoints from successful trajectories, enabling problem-specific rubric construction without human annotation or stronger teacher models.By jointly leveraging rubric-based and outcome rewards, Au-toRubric achieves state-of-the-art performance on six multimodal reasoning benchmarks and substantially improves reasoning faithfulness in dedicated evaluations. Correct Step ✅ Correct Answer

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