Expert-Guided Rubrics as Dense Reward Signals for Reinforcement Learning in Non-Verifiable Domains

Ashish Bansal, Hossam Amer, Keerat Kaur Guliani, Parinita Edke, Lesley Matheson +1

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents in non-verifiable domains such as financial services, where they must interpret user intent, rewrite queries, and retrieve information under domain-specific constraints. Although reinforcement learning (RL) can train such agents from the consequences of their actions, recent successes largely rely on verifiable tasks with automatically computed binary rewards. In non-verifiable retrieval tasks, assessing query quality requires scarce subject-matter expert (SME) judgment that is inherently graded rather than binary. With Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO), sparse rewards yield no useful learning signal when all sampled outputs within a group receive the same outcome, causing optimization to stall. We introduce a method that converts a small, fixed investment of SME judgment into a dense reward and combines it with retrieval-based metrics to form a hybrid, GRPO-compatible training signal. Experiments show improvements of up to 6\% in Recall@3 and 6.7\% in MRR@3 compared with sparse-reward baselines.