arXiv Machine Learning

Who Should We Listen to More? Welfare-Aware Preference Acquisition for Pluralistic Alignment

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 31

Personalized RewardBench: Evaluating Reward Models with Human Aligned Personalization

arXiv:2604. 07343v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Pluralistic alignment has emerged as a critical frontier in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), with reward models (RMs) serving as a central mechanism for capturing diverse human values.

By Qiyao Ma, Dechen Gao, Rui Cai, Boqi Zhao, Hanchu Zhou, Junshan Zhang, Zhe Zhao
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 21

BACON: Budgeted Human Calibration for Modeling and Evaluation with Multiple AI Judges

arXiv:2607. 16239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI judges offer a scalable, low-cost alternative to human evaluation, but their outputs can be biased relative to human preferences and highly item-dependent, varying across judges, tasks, and domains.

By Lei Shi, Anlan Zhang, Rita Lyu, Zhengmian Hu, Tong Yu, David Arbour, Avi Feller, Saayan Mitra, Ritwik Sinha
arXiv AI
Sep 28

DIAL: Position-Debiased LLM Judges with Adaptive Human Preference Calibration

The paper introduces DIAL, a framework that uses large language models (LLMs) as judges while mitigating position bias and aligning their judgments with human preferences. DIAL separates judge‑specific position effects, learns shared structure in debiased LLM preferences, and adaptively calibrates this structure toward human targets using limited human comparisons. Experiments on simulations and three human‑preference benchmarks show that DIAL remains robust to unbalanced response order, achieves strong human‑aligned rankings with few labels, and adapts when LLM information is imperfect, supported by a real‑data study of over 410K judgments from 21 LLM judges.

By Zesheng Cai, Yingqi Fan, Sichang Chen, Jin-Hong Du
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 20

To Go Far, Go Together: Diverse Preferences Induce a Curriculum for Reward Optimization

The paper introduces CurriPO, a tree‑structured curriculum that automatically adapts to diverse user reward models in AI alignment tasks. By exploiting the natural hierarchy between easy‑ and hard‑to‑optimize reward models, CurriPO covers a broad user population in a single traversal, reusing previously incorporated reward models. Experiments on personalized continuous control show that CurriPO improves population satisfaction by 1.2–2.1× over the strongest baseline while cutting training time and better serving users traditionally underserved by conventional optimization.

By Taehyung Kim, Jongeun Choi
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 22

From Value Conditioning to Behavioral Shift: Lightweight Value Alignment of LLMs

The paper investigates whether fine‑tuning large language models (LLMs) on value survey responses can shift their value‑conditioned outputs and downstream behavior. Researchers first estimate baseline value profiles for several open‑source LLMs using the ten Schwartz values, then fine‑tune the models on survey‑style supervision that selectively alters target value ratings while preserving non‑target values. The resulting shifts are evaluated on held‑out survey questions and on out‑of‑domain behavioral proxies, such as a contextual moral‑judgment benchmark from Reddit AITA posts and a text‑based interactive decision‑making benchmark. The study finds that survey‑based supervision can change both survey responses and downstream behavior, but the transfer is strongly model‑ and value‑dependent and influenced by how value descriptions are framed.

By Shangrui Nie, Florian Mai, David Kacz\'er, Charles Welch, Zhixue Zhao, Lucie Flek