LLM-as-a-Coach turns judge feedback into transferable experiential knowledge

iScienceLuvr · x · 2026-07-21

The paper proposes Experiential Learning (EL), which turns the usual LLM-as-a-Judge setup into an LLM-as-a-Coach.

Instead of collapsing feedback into a scalar score, the coach distills its assessment of each on-policy response into transferable experiential knowledge. That knowledge conditions a teacher model and is then internalized by the policy through on-policy context distillation. The authors report that, compared with standard rubric-based RL, EL improves held-out and unseen open-ended tasks, generalizes better beyond the training distribution, and helps mitigate reward hacking.

The screenshot also shows the paper’s high-level claim: richer, higher-bandwidth feedback preserves fine-grained preferences among high-quality responses and works across two policy families.

Related event: Microsoft Proposes LLM-as-a-Coach to Convert Feedback into Transferable Experience(3 posts)→

Original post →

More from Research

Research channel →