Jierun Chen
Author directory2026
J-ToRL: Tool-Integrated LLM-as-a-Judge via Reinforcement Learning
Bryan Wilie | Tiezheng YU | Gerry Windiarto Mohamad Dunda | Jierun Chen | Chaofan Tao | Yan Xu | Junxian He | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Bryan Wilie | Tiezheng YU | Gerry Windiarto Mohamad Dunda | Jierun Chen | Chaofan Tao | Yan Xu | Junxian He | Pascale Fung
Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
LLM-as-a-Judge frameworks offer scalable alternatives to human evaluation but inherit the limitations of text-only reasoning, particularly in tasks requiring precise computations. We introduce J-ToRL, a framework that trains LLM judges to leverage computational tools via code generation through end-to-end reinforcement learning (RL). Unlike prior approaches relying on inference-time integration, J-ToRL internalizes tool-use strategies as part of its policy, enabling exploration of diverse reasoning pathways. We identify a key challenge in applying RL with verifiable rewards to judgment: the coarse reward signals inherent in multiple-choice verdicts can incentivize shortcut learning. J-ToRL mitigates this via an auxiliary verifiable reward mechanism based on reference-answers, that enforces stricter criteria beyond simple verdict accuracy alone. With a sophisticated pairwise comparison dataset across five domains, J-ToRL-trained LLMs improve the base models, outperform prior judges, and close the gap to frontier LLMs. Further, J-ToRL-trained models exhibit beneficial cognitive behaviors such as self-error-recovery and self-refinement of tool use strategies.