arXiv:2606. 28998v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) alignment trains an LLM using preference data to produce outputs that better meet established quality standards.
By Gias Uddin, Sanjeepan Sivapiran
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
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
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
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:2608. 12097v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Rubric-based evaluators commonly treat rubrics as prompt context or flat criteria: they specify what to judge but leave criterion composition implicit, even when natural-language rules state it.
By Xi Chen, Jie Mu, Mo Xuan, Qun Shao
arXiv:2503. 09020v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) have been widely adopted in commercial code completion engines, significantly enhancing coding efficiency and productivity.
By Liang Lu, Yuan Jiang, Christoph Treude, Shuzheng Gao, Jingyu Xiao, Xiaohong Su, Michael R. Lyu
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:2605. 00754v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Reward models (RMs) have become an indispensable fixture of the language model (LM) post-training playbook, enabling policy alignment and test-time scaling.
By Indraneil Paul, Goran Glava\v{s}, Iryna Gurevych
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
arXiv:2601.08654v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Rubric-based text evaluation increasingly relies on large language models (LLMs) as scalable judges, yet frozen black-box models can interpret the...
By Yihan Hong, Huaiyuan Yao, Bolin Shen, Wanpeng Xu, Hua Wei, Yushun Dong
arXiv:2602.13576v2 Announce Type: replace-cross
Abstract: Evaluation and alignment pipelines for large language models increasingly rely on LLM-based judges, whose behavior is guided by natural-langu...
By Ruomeng Ding, Yifei Pang, He Sun, Yizhong Wang, Zhiwei Steven Wu, Zhun Deng