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, AutoRubric-R1V achieves state-of-the-art performance on six multimodal reasoning benchmarks and substantially improves reasoning faithfulness in dedicated evaluations.
- Anthology ID:
- 2026.findings-acl.1282
- Volume:
- Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2026
- Address:
- San Diego, California, United States
- Editors:
- Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
- Venue:
- Findings
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 25707–25724
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1282/
- DOI:
- Bibkey:
- Cite (ACL):
- Mengzhao Jia, Zhihan Zhang, Ignacio Cases, Zheyuan Liu, Meng Jiang, and Peng Qi. 2026. AutoRubric: Rubric-Based Generative Rewards for Faithful Multimodal Reasoning. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 25707–25724, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- AutoRubric: Rubric-Based Generative Rewards for Faithful Multimodal Reasoning (Jia et al., Findings 2026)
- Copy Citation:
- PDF:
- https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-acl.1282.pdf
- Checklist:
- 2026.findings-acl.1282.checklist.pdf

















