SCOPE: Self-Play via Co-Evolving Policies for Open-Ended Tasks

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Kwan, Wai-Chung, Gema, Aryo Pradipta, Leang, Joshua Ong Jun, Minervini, Pasquale
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2026
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author Kwan, Wai-Chung
Gema, Aryo Pradipta
Leang, Joshua Ong Jun
Minervini, Pasquale
author_facet Kwan, Wai-Chung
Gema, Aryo Pradipta
Leang, Joshua Ong Jun
Minervini, Pasquale
contents Self-play can train language models without external supervision. However, existing methods require rule-checkable answers, leaving open-ended tasks dependent on curated prompts or frontier-model judges. We introduce SCOPE, a data-free self-play framework for open-ended tasks that co-evolves two policies: a Challenger that generates document-grounded tasks, and a Solver that answers them through multi-turn retrieval. A frozen copy of the initial model serves as the self-judge, which writes task-specific rubrics from the source document and grades Solver responses against them. Across three 7-8B instruction-tuned models (Qwen2.5, Qwen3, OLMo-3), SCOPE improves open-ended performance by up to +10.4 points on eight benchmarks and matches or exceeds GRPO_data trained on ~9K curated prompts. Although trained only on open-ended tasks, SCOPE also improves held-out short-form QA by up to +13.8 points on seven held-out benchmarks, surpassing GRPO_data on all three models. Ablations show that co-evolving the Challenger is necessary to keep tasks near the Solver's frontier, that gains arise from improvements in both retrieval and synthesis with the relative contribution varying by task, and that rubric generation quality is the bottleneck for self-judging.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_31433
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SCOPE: Self-Play via Co-Evolving Policies for Open-Ended Tasks
Kwan, Wai-Chung
Gema, Aryo Pradipta
Leang, Joshua Ong Jun
Minervini, Pasquale
Computation and Language
Self-play can train language models without external supervision. However, existing methods require rule-checkable answers, leaving open-ended tasks dependent on curated prompts or frontier-model judges. We introduce SCOPE, a data-free self-play framework for open-ended tasks that co-evolves two policies: a Challenger that generates document-grounded tasks, and a Solver that answers them through multi-turn retrieval. A frozen copy of the initial model serves as the self-judge, which writes task-specific rubrics from the source document and grades Solver responses against them. Across three 7-8B instruction-tuned models (Qwen2.5, Qwen3, OLMo-3), SCOPE improves open-ended performance by up to +10.4 points on eight benchmarks and matches or exceeds GRPO_data trained on ~9K curated prompts. Although trained only on open-ended tasks, SCOPE also improves held-out short-form QA by up to +13.8 points on seven held-out benchmarks, surpassing GRPO_data on all three models. Ablations show that co-evolving the Challenger is necessary to keep tasks near the Solver's frontier, that gains arise from improvements in both retrieval and synthesis with the relative contribution varying by task, and that rubric generation quality is the bottleneck for self-judging.
title SCOPE: Self-Play via Co-Evolving Policies for Open-Ended Tasks
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.31433