arXiv AI

CriterAlign: Criterion-Centric Rationale Alignment for Code Preference Judging

arXiv:2605. 19665v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pairwise human preference prediction is central to evaluating code-generation systems, where quality often depends on task-specific trade-offs beyond functional correctness.

arXiv AI
Jun 8

SWE-IF: Aligning Code Evaluation with Human Preference

arXiv:2510. 07315v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have catalyzed vibe coding, where users leverage LLMs to generate and iteratively refine code through natural language interactions until it passes their vibe check.

By Ming Zhong, Xiang Zhou, Ting-Yun Chang, Qingze Wang, Nan Xu, Xiance Si, Dan Garrette, Shyam Upadhyay, Jeremiah Liu, Jiawei Han, Benoit Schillings, Jiao Sun
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Instruction Quality Matters: Refining Instructions for Effective Preference Learning

The paper investigates how the quality of instructions used to generate response pairs affects preference learning for language models. It shows that low‑quality or ambiguous instructions limit the range of response quality, weakening preference signals, and introduces an instruction‑refinement pipeline that improves data quality without discarding examples. Experiments across models and benchmarks demonstrate that refining instructions leads to better alignment and complements other data‑improvement methods.

By Seohyeong Lee, Hwaran Lee, Buru Chang
arXiv AI
2d ago

PADM\'E: Preference Alignment Data Synthesis for Meta-Evaluation of LM Agent Evaluators

PADM'E is a method for synthesizing preference‑aligned data to meta‑evaluate language‑model (LM) evaluators of agentic behaviors. It reframes meta‑evaluation as a preference judgment problem, generating criterion‑based data with small LMs and no human involvement. In a prototype, PADM'E produced 1,000 samples across four domains and three criteria, and human validation showed agreement with human judgment rising from 73% to 85% compared to a naive baseline.

By Cheng Chang, Yining Mao, Peng Qi
arXiv AI
Sep 10

DSPA: Dynamic SAE Steering for Data-Efficient Preference Alignment

The paper introduces DSPA, a dynamic sparse autoencoder (SAE) steering technique that aligns language model outputs with user preferences during inference, avoiding costly weight updates. DSPA constructs a conditional-difference map from preference triples to adjust token-active latents, improving MT‑Bench scores and matching AlpacaEval performance on models like Gemma‑2 and Qwen3 while preserving accuracy. It demonstrates robustness with limited preference data, outperforms the two‑stage RAHF‑SCIT pipeline in FLOPs, and reveals that preference directions are largely driven by discourse and stylistic cues.

By James Wedgwood, Aashiq Muhamed, Mona T. Diab, Virginia Smith
arXiv AI
Aug 26

Preference Data Selection for Mitigating the Alignment Tax in Large Language Models

The paper introduces BALIGN, a balanced data selection strategy designed to reduce catastrophic forgetting—referred to as the alignment tax—in large language models during preference-based alignment. By analyzing preference optimization gradients, the authors identify three data-centric features that influence parameter drift: the reference model's log-probability margin, token length differences between chosen and rejected responses, and TF‑IDF similarity to general capability corpora. BALIGN aggregates these features into a composite risk score to filter out high-risk preference samples, thereby preserving foundational capabilities while maintaining alignment gains with minimal computational overhead.

By Minsu Kim, Jianxun Lian, Xing Xie, Steven Euijong Whang
arXiv AI
Aug 20

SESSE: Sketch, Expand, Sort, Summarize, Evaluate -- LLM-as-Judge Evaluation via Structured Decomposition

The paper introduces SESSE, a training‑free framework that breaks down LLM‑as‑judge evaluations into five steps—Sketch, Expand, Sort, Summarize, Evaluate—by mining sub‑questions from the judge’s own error cases. It requires no oracle responses, task‑specific rubrics, or fine‑tuning, yet on RewardBench it matches the performance of chain‑of‑thought baselines and rivals a fine‑tuned specialist (RISE‑Judge‑32B). SESSE provides per‑criterion vote evidence, offering an interpretable audit trail that can diagnose label ambiguity and judge failure modes that a single holistic output token cannot reveal.

By Dae Lee, Mihai Delgeanu, Adel Youssef