{"ID":2849485,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.23038","arxiv_id":"2510.23038","title":"Incentivizing Agentic Reasoning in LLM Judges via Tool-Integrated Reinforcement Learning","abstract":"Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used as judges to evaluate response quality, providing a scalable alternative to human evaluation. However, most LLM judges operate solely on intrinsic text-based reasoning, limiting their ability to verify complex constraints or perform accurate computation. Motivated by the success of tool-integrated reasoning (TIR) in numerous tasks, we propose TIR-Judge, an end-to-end RL framework for training LLM judges that integrates a code executor for precise evaluation. TIR-Judge is built on three principles: (i) diverse training across verifiable and non-verifiable domains, (ii) flexible judgment formats (pointwise, pairwise, listwise), and (iii) iterative RL that bootstraps directly from the initial model without distillation. On seven public benchmarks, TIR-Judge surpasses strong reasoning-based judges by up to 6.4% (pointwise) and 7.7% (pairwise), and achieves listwise performance comparable to Claude-Opus-4 despite having only 8B parameters. Remarkably, TIR-Judge-Zero - trained entirely without distilled judge trajectories, matches the performance of distilled variants, demonstrating that tool-augmented judges can self-evolve through iterative reinforcement learning.","short_abstract":"Large Language Models (LLMs) are widely used as judges to evaluate response quality, providing a scalable alternative to human evaluation. However, most LLM judges operate solely on intrinsic text-based reasoning, limiting their ability to verify complex constraints or perform accurate computation. Motivated by the suc...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.23038","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.23038v2","authors":"[\"Ran Xu\",\"Jingjing Chen\",\"Jiayu Ye\",\"Yu Wu\",\"Jun Yan\",\"Carl Yang\",\"Hongkun Yu\"]","published":"2025-10-27T06:03:37Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\",\"cs.AI\",\"cs.LG\"]","methods":"[\"Reinforcement Learning\",\"Large Language Model\",\"Language Model\"]","has_code":false}