Alice is a new large-scale German benchmark for Automatic Short Answer Scoring that focuses on rubric-based evaluation. It contains three subtasks—learning performance (Alice‑LP), knowledge elements (Alice‑KE), and skills (Alice‑SK)—and is designed to assess how well students master underlying concepts and skills rather than just answer questions directly. Experiments show that large language models struggle with zero‑shot scoring of knowledge elements and skills, and that rubric text is especially helpful for Alice‑KE and Alice‑SK.
By Zhifan Sun, Sebastian Gombert, Jannik Lossjew, Tobias Wyrwich, Berrit Katharina Czinczel, David Bednorz, Marcus Kubsch, Knut Neumann, Hendrik Drachsler
arXiv:2607. 19219v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) have been widely applied to automated essay scoring (AES) and automated feedback generation (AFG).
By Xuefeng Jin, Jiashuo Zhang, Teng Cao, Bin Yang
Large language models (LLMs) have been widely applied to automated essay scoring (AES) and automated feedback generation (AFG). However, existing studies rely primarily on prompt engineering or supervised fine-tuning, while systematic research on reinforcement learning (RL) post-training and automated evaluation of feedback quality remains limited.
The paper proposes a response‑free method for estimating difficulty of reading‑comprehension multiple‑choice items by fine‑tuning a transformer on item wording. It introduces two extensions to a baseline joint‑encoding model: a component‑wise variant that encodes passage, question, and options separately, and a multi‑task variant that adds a question‑answering auxiliary task. Experiments on a corpus of nearly 30,000 items show that both extensions outperform the baseline, especially the multi‑task variant across all metrics and the component‑wise variant in rank ordering, even with limited training data.
By Jan Net\'ik, Patr\'icia Martinkov\'a
The paper investigates what gradient similarity measures in data attribution for large language models. By independently varying task and answer format in supervised fine‑tuning benchmarks, the authors show that gradient alignment is driven by answer format rather than task semantics, with strong alignment for shared formats and none for differing formats. This pattern persists across training stages, model sizes, and families, and is evident in the selections of the LESS data‑selection method, which over‑represents its own answer format.
By Sunwoo Kim, Seokwon Jung, Sohyung Kim, Seong Joon Oh, Alice Oh
arXiv:2610.13375v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Rubrics have been widely used to evaluate and optimize language models on open-ended tasks. However, existing work primarily focuses on generating bett...
By Feifei Qian, Xuan Chen, Lixin Cui, Chaoyang Mei, Fanlin Meng, Shuyao Xiao, Ming Cui, Junxi Yin, Lu Bai
arXiv:2609.24650v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Readability assessment is essential for tailoring texts to intended audiences across educational, healthcare, and information retrieval domains. Howeve...
By Rapha\"el Thieffry, Matej Martinc
arXiv:2608.29856v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used as scalable evaluators for open-ended tasks. However, many LLM judges derive query-specific criteria during...
By Yifan Chen, Haitao Li, Qingyao Ai, Fengbin Zhu, Tat-Seng Chua, Min Zhang, Yiqun Liu
arXiv:2606. 03116v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The rapid advancement of instruction-guided audio generation has highlighted the critical need for robust alignment evaluation.
By Haitao Li, Tian Tan, Yuguang Yang, Shan Yang, Xie Chen
arXiv:2605. 31220v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Confidence estimation (CE), i.
By Athina Kyriakou, Dennis Ulmer, Ivan Titov
arXiv:2606. 05180v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated scoring models are increasingly used to assign rubric-based quality ratings to complex language performances, including classroom transcripts, yet they typically provide little insight into why a particular score is produced.
By Ivo Bueno, Babette B\"uhler, Philipp Stark, Tim F\"utterer, Ulrich Trautwein, Dorottya Demszky, Heather Hill, Enkelejda Kasneci
arXiv:2606. 24841v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Prompt-based learning has emerged as a dominant paradigm in natural language processing.
By Ahmad Pouramini, Hesham Faili