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MERIT: Matching Expertise via Rubric-Informed Training for Reviewer Assignment

arxiv.org/abs/2605.27865

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Updated 5 h ago · first seen 11 Sept 2026

paper_01M294G5X6ACKR8S3K0CSKEVTG

Published
11 Sept 2026
T1 · 5 h ago
arXiv
2605.27865
T1 · 5 h ago
Category
cs.CL
T1 · 5 h ago

Abstract

Matching submissions with suitable reviewers at scale is a growing challenge for major venues, yet existing approaches either rely on coarse proxy signals that conflate general relatedness with true suitability, or require expensive human annotations that are difficult to scale for training. We propose MERIT, a two-stage framework that bridges this gap by converting criterion-level expertise matching into scalable suitability supervision. In the first stage, we train a reviewer assessor via reinforcement learning to identify the expertise dimensions a paper requires, match them against the reviewer's prior work, and produce a suitability decision, with rewards provided by an LLM judge guided by paper-specific expertise rubrics. In the second stage, we distill the assessor's predictions into an embedding-based retriever for efficient large-scale assignment. Experiments show that our 4B reviewer assessor outperforms larger general-purpose LLMs on suitability classification, and the resulting retriever achieves state-of-the-art performance across LR-Bench and the CMU Gold dataset. Our code is available at https://github.com/Luli3220/MERIT.

Authors 4

Zixuan Yang, Yibo Zhao, Weicong Liu, Xiang Li

Specification

Official page

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 5 h agohigh

Arxiv announce type
replace

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 5 h agohigh

arXiv id
2605.27865

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 5 h agohigh

Categories
cs.CL

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 5 h agohigh

PDF

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 5 h agohigh

Primary category
cs.CL

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 5 h agohigh

Published
11 Sept 2026

Source:arXiv (Atom API + RSS)T1observed 5 h agohigh

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Attributed facts

9

Source tiers

T19

Freshest observation

5 h ago

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None