Rubric Dropout: A Simple Way to Mitigate Reward Hacking in Rubric-Based RL

Rubric-based reinforcement learning, in which an LLM judge scores responses against prompt-specific criteria, has become a standard way to post-train language models on tasks without verifiable answers. The rubric, however, is only a proxy for response quality, and a policy trained against it long enough learns to exploit the difference. We train models with GRPO on medical and science rubrics and grade their responses on out-of-distribution (OOD) benchmarks throughout training with two judges: the training judge and a stronger OOD judge. The two scores first rise together and then diverge. The policy is learning to satisfy the training judge without writing better responses, which is a form of reward hacking. To mitigate it, we propose Rubric Dropout, which applies dropout to rubric criteria: at each training step, a random subset of each rubric’s criteria is removed from the reward, so the rewarded subset of criteria is resampled at each step. All responses sampled for the same prompt are scored on the same subset, so their rewards re- main comparable, and evaluation always uses the full rubric. We also introduce Block Dropout, which drops semantically similar criteria together so that a near- duplicate of a dropped criterion cannot keep rewarding the same behavior. Across both benchmarks and models from 1.7B to 8B, dropout improves the gold judge’s score on OOD benchmarks by up to 3% on HealthBench-Hard and 7% on ResearchQA, and it reduces both the gap between the two judges and over-crediting. It keeps in-domain reward close to the baseline, and dropout rates of 30–50% work best. Block Dropout improves the gold judge’s OOD score further at the same dropout rate. Changing which criteria are rewarded at each step is a simple, inexpensive way to make rubric rewards harder to exploit.