@inproceedings{jian-etal-2026-patarm,
title = "{P}a{T}a{RM}: Bridging Pairwise and Pointwise Signals via Preference-Aware Task-Adaptive Reward Modeling",
author = "Jian, Ai and
Ruan, Jingqing and
Ma, Xing and
Li, Dailin and
Zhang, Weipeng and
Zeng, Ke and
Cai, Xunliang",
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://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.927/",
pages = "20240--20268",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-390-6",
abstract = "Reward models (RMs) are central to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), providing the critical supervision signals that align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences.Generative reward models (GRMs) provide greater interpretability than traditional scalar RMs, but they come with a critical trade-off: pairwise methods are hindered by a training-inference mismatch, while pointwise methods require expensive absolute annotations.To bridge this gap, we propose the Preference-aware Task-adaptive Reward Model (PaTaRM).Unlike prior approaches, PaTaRM enables robust pointwise training using readily available pairwise data via a novel Preference-Aware Reward (PAR) mechanism, eliminating the need for explicit rating labels. Furthermore, it incorporates a task-adaptive rubric system that dynamically generates instance-specific criteria for precise evaluation.Extensive experiments demonstrate that PaTaRM achieves an average relative improvement of 8.7{\%} over the corresponding base models on RewardBench and RMBench across the Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B backbones.Crucially, when used as a reward model for downstream RLHF, it yields an average relative improvement of 13.6{\%} over the corresponding base policies on IFEval and InfoBench, validating its effectiveness for policy alignment.Our code, data, and checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/AIJian/PaTaRM"
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<abstract>Reward models (RMs) are central to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), providing the critical supervision signals that align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences.Generative reward models (GRMs) provide greater interpretability than traditional scalar RMs, but they come with a critical trade-off: pairwise methods are hindered by a training-inference mismatch, while pointwise methods require expensive absolute annotations.To bridge this gap, we propose the Preference-aware Task-adaptive Reward Model (PaTaRM).Unlike prior approaches, PaTaRM enables robust pointwise training using readily available pairwise data via a novel Preference-Aware Reward (PAR) mechanism, eliminating the need for explicit rating labels. Furthermore, it incorporates a task-adaptive rubric system that dynamically generates instance-specific criteria for precise evaluation.Extensive experiments demonstrate that PaTaRM achieves an average relative improvement of 8.7% over the corresponding base models on RewardBench and RMBench across the Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B backbones.Crucially, when used as a reward model for downstream RLHF, it yields an average relative improvement of 13.6% over the corresponding base policies on IFEval and InfoBench, validating its effectiveness for policy alignment.Our code, data, and checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/AIJian/PaTaRM</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T PaTaRM: Bridging Pairwise and Pointwise Signals via Preference-Aware Task-Adaptive Reward Modeling
%A Jian, Ai
%A Ruan, Jingqing
%A Ma, Xing
%A Li, Dailin
%A Zhang, Weipeng
%A Zeng, Ke
%A Cai, Xunliang
%Y Liakata, Maria
%Y Moreira, Viviane P.
%Y Zhang, Jiajun
%Y Jurgens, David
%S Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C San Diego, California, United States
%@ 979-8-89176-390-6
%F jian-etal-2026-patarm
%X Reward models (RMs) are central to reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), providing the critical supervision signals that align large language models (LLMs) with human preferences.Generative reward models (GRMs) provide greater interpretability than traditional scalar RMs, but they come with a critical trade-off: pairwise methods are hindered by a training-inference mismatch, while pointwise methods require expensive absolute annotations.To bridge this gap, we propose the Preference-aware Task-adaptive Reward Model (PaTaRM).Unlike prior approaches, PaTaRM enables robust pointwise training using readily available pairwise data via a novel Preference-Aware Reward (PAR) mechanism, eliminating the need for explicit rating labels. Furthermore, it incorporates a task-adaptive rubric system that dynamically generates instance-specific criteria for precise evaluation.Extensive experiments demonstrate that PaTaRM achieves an average relative improvement of 8.7% over the corresponding base models on RewardBench and RMBench across the Qwen3-8B and Qwen3-14B backbones.Crucially, when used as a reward model for downstream RLHF, it yields an average relative improvement of 13.6% over the corresponding base policies on IFEval and InfoBench, validating its effectiveness for policy alignment.Our code, data, and checkpoints are available at https://huggingface.co/AIJian/PaTaRM
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.927/
%P 20240-20268
Markdown (Informal)
[PaTaRM: Bridging Pairwise and Pointwise Signals via Preference-Aware Task-Adaptive Reward Modeling](https://aclanthology.org/2026.acl-long.927/) (Jian et al., ACL 2026)
ACL
- Ai Jian, Jingqing Ruan, Xing Ma, Dailin Li, Weipeng Zhang, Ke Zeng, and Xunliang Cai. 2026. PaTaRM: Bridging Pairwise and Pointwise Signals via Preference-Aware Task-Adaptive Reward Modeling. In Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 20240–20268, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.