arXiv Machine Learning

REALM: Reliable Expertise-Aware Language Model Fine-Tuning from Noisy Annotations

arXiv:2604. 17289v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Supervised fine-tuning of large language models relies on human-annotated data, yet annotation pipelines routinely involve multiple crowdworkers of heterogeneous expertise.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

IDEAlign: Comparing Ideas of Large Language Models to Domain Expert

IDEAlign introduces a new protocol for evaluating the similarity of large language model (LLM) annotations to expert judgments. It uses pick‑the‑odd‑one‑out tasks to capture expert similarity and benchmarks various similarity methods—including text embeddings, topic models, and LLM-as-a-judge—against these human ratings. Applied to educational datasets, the study finds that most metrics miss nuanced expert dimensions, with LLM-as-a-judge performing best yet still insufficient for full expert alignment.

By Hyunji Nam, Lucia Langlois, James Malamut, Mei Tan, Dorottya Demszky
arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago

Large Language Model Selection with Limited Annotations

arXiv:2605.24981v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Choosing a Large Language Model (LLM) for a given task requires comparing many strong candidates, yet standard evaluation relies on costly annotati...

By Yavuz Durmazkeser, Patrik Okanovic, Andreas Kirsch, Torsten Hoefler, Nezihe Merve G\"urel
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

LLMs learn different forms of metacognition when trained to predict their own accuracy

The study trains ten open‑weight large language models (LLMs) to predict their own accuracy on factual multiple‑choice questions before answering. Results show that the models’ confidence signals split into two distinct patterns: early in training, confidence aligns with output consistency (how concentrated the answer distribution is), while later, it aligns with true accuracy but only on data similar to the training set. This indicates that calibration training may not universally teach LLMs to detect their own errors.

By Nicolas Yax, Stefano Palminteri, Pierre-Yves Oudeyer
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Human Label Variation as Stable Signal: Learning Annotator-Specific Explanation Behavior via Cross-Annotator Preference Optimization

The paper investigates whether large language models can learn and reproduce annotator‑specific label‑explanation behavior, using two sentence‑pair tasks with four annotators each. It finds that individual annotator patterns are weak at the single‑annotation level but become detectable after reducing input‑content effects and aggregating across annotators. The authors propose cross‑annotator preference optimization (CAPO), which improves upon prompting and supervised fine‑tuning by better capturing annotator‑specific reasoning while maintaining stable attribution.

By Beiduo Chen, Pingjun Hong, Ziyun Zhang, Benjamin Roth, Anna Korhonen, Barbara Plank
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Experts Rise Where LLMs Disagree: Using Cross-Model Disagreement to Target Expert Effort in LLM Codebook Revision for Large-Scale Annotation

The paper proposes using large language models (LLMs) to identify disagreements among models as a way to focus expert effort on revising codebooks for large‑scale text annotation. Three expert feedback methods are evaluated: editing LLM‑generated revisions (Codebook Verifying), answering questions about disagreements (Question Answering), and labeling disagreement cases with rationales (Rationale Labeling). Experiments on tutoring‑session transcripts show that Rationale Labeling achieves the highest LLM‑labeling accuracy (64.9%) compared to the expert‑revised codebook (57.8%), with Question Answering also outperforming the baseline (60.5%).

By Zeyu He, Zhuqian Zhou, Kirk Vanacore, Rene F. Kizilcec, Ting-Hao 'Kenneth' Huang
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 11

UNMASK: Discovering and Causally Verifying Spurious Shortcuts in Text Classifiers

arXiv:2608. 09209v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Neural language models trained on large crowdsourced corpora frequently exploit spurious surface patterns tied to target labels without true linguistic or causal relevance, boosting benchmark performance while failing on adversarial or out-of-distribution inputs.

By Chidaksh Ravuru, Shashank Srivastava
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 25

A Probabilistic Approach for Model Alignment with Human Comparisons

The paper proposes a two‑stage framework, SL+LHF, that first learns low‑dimensional representations from noisy labeled data and then refines model alignment using human comparison feedback via a probabilistic bisection approach. It introduces the label‑noise‑to‑comparison‑accuracy (LNCA) ratio to theoretically identify when this framework outperforms pure supervised learning, showing that trading labels for comparisons reduces sample complexity when labels are scarce. Experiments on a high‑dimensional crowdfunding prediction task and an Amazon Mechanical Turk study confirm that incorporating human or large language model evaluators improves accuracy under a fixed query budget.

By Junyu Cao, Mohsen Bayati
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 10

UNMASK: Discovering and Causally Verifying Spurious Shortcuts in Text Classifiers

Neural language models trained on large crowdsourced corpora frequently exploit spurious surface patterns tied to target labels without true linguistic or causal relevance, boosting benchmark performance while failing on adversarial or out-of-distribution inputs. Existing approaches either require manual specification of the feature vocabulary or automate discovery only partially, leaving the gap between dataset-level correlation and model-level exploitation unaddressed.