Reinforcement learning is one of the best techniques for making agents more reliable, and has been widely adopted by frontier labs. However, adoption in the outside community has been slow because it's so hard to implement.
One of the biggest challenges when adapting RL to a new task is the need for a task-specific "reward function" (way of measuring success). This is often difficult to define, and requires either high-quality labeled data and/or significant domain expertise to generate.
RULER is a drop-in reward function that works across different tasks without any of that complexity.
It works by showing N trajectories to an LLM judge and asking it to rank them relative to each other. This sidesteps the calibration issues that plague most LLM-as-judge approaches. Combined with GRPO (which only cares about relative scores within groups), it just works (surprisingly well!).
We have a full writeup on the blog, including results on 4 production tasks. On all 4 tasks, small Qwen 2.5 models trained with RULER+GRPO beat the best prompted frontier model, despite being significantly smaller and cheaper to run. Surprisingly, they even beat models trained with hand-crafted reward functions on 3/4 tasks! https://openpipe.ai/blog/ruler
