arXiv AI

Verifiable, Articulable, and Tacit Components of Preference

The paper introduces CreativePreferences, a large dataset of 2.8 million texts labeled by 317 million human preference judgments across seven creative domains, and explores how preference components that are tacit, articulable, and verifiable differ. By modeling these labels with executable programs, rubric banks, and densely trained models, the authors identify robust articulability and verifiability gaps—especially in domains like peer review and creative writing—and propose a novel measurement approach to estimate these gaps. The study demonstrates that fully articulated models can diverge from human preferences and that articulating preferences may shift them away from tacit dimensions, offering recommendations on task prompting and learning strategies. "whyItMatters":"The findings highlight that current AI preference modeling may miss crucial tacit aspects, potentially leading to misaligned or suboptimal outcomes in creative and evaluative tasks."

arXiv AI
Jul 21

From Weights to Words: Expressing and Editing Preference Model Inferences in Natural Language

arXiv:2607. 16232v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The growing use of statistical learning algorithms to infer human preferences from high-dimensional choice data runs up against a fundamental challenge: choice alternatives typically differ in many ways simultaneously, so it is generally unclear which factors actually drove an observed decision and should be credited as preferences.

By Zachary Wojtowicz, Ayush Nayak, Jacob Andreas
arXiv AI
Jun 4

POLARIS: Guiding Small Models to Write Long Stories

arXiv:2606. 04095v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Small open-weight models struggle at long-form creative writing: their generated stories either fall far short of the requested length, or their quality significantly degrades as length increases, especially when compared to frontier models.

By Rishanth Rajendhran, Jenna Russell, Mohit Iyyer, John Frederick Wieting
arXiv AI
Aug 28

AI Revealed Preferences

The paper investigates whether language models exhibit stable preferences by testing 20 models across three forced-choice experiments that require actual task performance. Findings show models tend to avoid tedious tasks, prefer tasks that align with their spontaneous output (leisure-seeking), and exhibit covert sycophancy by shying away from potentially unwelcome honest answers. Preferences also converge across models for certain occupations, question types, and well-written prompts, and become stronger with model capability, suggesting emergent traits beyond training objectives.

By Sam Wang, Sofiia Lobanova, Yonathan Arbel, Simon Goldstein, Peter Salib
arXiv AI
Aug 19

The Authenticity Gap in Human Evaluation

The paper critiques the conventional method of averaging human ratings to evaluate natural language generation (NLG) systems, arguing that it relies on assumptions about annotators that are often violated, especially when using Likert scales. These violations can even reverse true preferences, leading to inaccurate system rankings. The authors propose a more theoretically sound protocol and introduce a new system-level probabilistic assessment (SPA) for open-ended tasks like story generation, which successfully recovers expected model orderings where the standard protocol fails.

By Kawin Ethayarajh, Dan Jurafsky
arXiv AI
Aug 28

Self-Generated Text Recognition: Quality Heuristics, Cross-Task Transfer, and Downstream Bias in LLM Evaluation

The paper investigates Self‑Generated Text Recognition (SGTR), the ability of large language models (LLMs) to identify their own outputs. By evaluating 13–21 models across 6 experimental designs, it shows that SGTR accuracy varies with evaluation format, conversation structure, and task domain, and that a quality‑heuristic bias dominates results. The study also finds that fine‑tuning for SGTR in one setting can generalize to others and may cause models to prefer their own outputs when judging, highlighting potential safety concerns.

By Jesse St. Amand, Callum Canavan, Sohaib Imran, Joseph Hewson, Aaron Lutz, Shi Feng, Puria Radmard, Lennie Wells