Wentao Zhao
Author directory2026
Learning Query-Specific Rubrics from Human Preferences for DeepResearch Report Generation
Changze Lv | Jie Zhou | Wentao Zhao | Jingwen Xu | Shihan Dou | Zisu Huang | Muzhao Tian | Xiaohua Wang | Yang Liu | Pluto Zhou | Tao Gui | Le Tian | Zhou Xiao | Xiaoqing Zheng | Xuanjing Huang | Jie Zhou
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Changze Lv | Jie Zhou | Wentao Zhao | Jingwen Xu | Shihan Dou | Zisu Huang | Muzhao Tian | Xiaohua Wang | Yang Liu | Pluto Zhou | Tao Gui | Le Tian | Zhou Xiao | Xiaoqing Zheng | Xuanjing Huang | Jie Zhou
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Nowadays, developing reliable DeepResearch-style long-form report generation remains challenging, as training and evaluation lack verifiable reward signals. Accordingly, rubric-based evaluation has become a common practice. However, existing approaches either rely on coarse, pre-defined rubrics that lack sufficient granularity or depend on manually constructed query-specific rubrics that are costly and difficult to scale. In this paper, we propose a pipeline to train preference-grounded query-specific rubric generators tailored for DeepResearch report generation. We first construct a dataset of DeepResearch-style queries annotated with human preferences over paired reports, and train rubric generators via reinforcement learning with a hybrid reward combining preference consistency, format validity, and LLM-based rubric evaluation. We evaluate the resulting rubric generators in two stages. First, on a held-out human-preference test set, the learned rubrics discriminate preferred from rejected reports more effectively than generic, prompted, or SFT-trained rubric alternatives. Second, when used as reward signals to train DeepResearch systems, our rubric generators yield substantial performance gains under both a simple single-agent ReAct framework and a complex multi-agent workflow on the DeepResearch Bench. Our code and model are available at https://huggingface.co/fdu-lcz/rubric_generator.