Scaling Laws for Generative Reward Models

Overview & Synopsis

We study generative reward models (GenRMs) as online preference providers for policy optimization in creative writing. Across Qwen3 reward-model sizes from 0.6B to 14B, Thinking judges trained with GRPO have higher static Gold-label accuracy than Answer-Only judges trained with SFT. This ranking often reverses when the judges train policies through online DPO: Answer-Only rewarders yield higher peak and top-five-average policy Elo in seven of eight matched settings under a fixed, learned 32B Gold evaluator. Intermediate Thinking-judge checkpoints can also outperform later, more statically accurate checkpoints as rewarders. Sweeps over rewarder size, policy size, training duration and DPO regularization show substantial benefits from reward-model capacity, including judges larger than the policy. We analyze trajectories with evaluator-specific Elo arenas, conditional match-resampling intervals and descriptive scaling fits. These results demonstrate an evaluator-rewarder gap in the studied pipelines: fixed-distribution judging accuracy does not determine downstream optimization quality. The comparison changes judge-training objective as well as response format, and the main ranking is conditional on its learned reference rather than a universal human-quality result. A limited follow-up using a different learned judge is inconclusive overall.