arXiv AI

A Finetuned SpeechLLM for Joint Multi-Granular L2 Assessment and Natural-Language Rationales

arXiv:2606. 09470v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated L2 speech assessment can assign proficiency labels, but often lacks interpretability.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 24

Granuscore: A Reference-Free Measure of Granularity for Text Analysis and Question Answering

Granuscore is a reference‑free metric that measures the granularity of text by exploiting the structure of a hierarchical embedding space. It successfully reproduces known hierarchical orderings on the Granola‑EQ dataset, distinguishes granularity across different discourse contexts, and explains sentence‑specificity variations beyond sentence length. The authors also apply Granuscore to four question‑answering benchmarks, revealing systematic differences in granularity among questions, gold answers, and model outputs, thereby offering a new lens for assessing QA dataset difficulty.

By Lukas Ellinger, Alexander Fichtl, Miriam Ansch\"utz, Georg Groh
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Evaluating Language Models in Realistic Conversational Contexts

The paper introduces UPHELD, a large benchmark of human-to-human dialogues written by professional script writers, featuring realistic turn densities and over 36,000 per-turn human annotations. It evaluates existing automatic metrics and LLM-as-a-judge methods, finding them unreliable against expert human judgment. Using UPHELD, the authors develop a Mixture-of-Judges framework that improves correlation with human assessments by about 30%.

By Ilija Subasic, Andrew Rabinovich, Zhao Chen
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Nuha-Speech: Building General-Purpose Arabic Speech-LLMs

Nuha‑Speech is a new initiative aimed at creating general‑purpose Arabic speech‑large language models (speech‑LLMs). It includes the construction of a large Arabic Speech Question‑Answering corpus with over 1.5 million samples for instruction tuning, supervised fine‑tuning of Qwen‑Omni model variants at various scales, and a systematic evaluation framework with diverse tasks and tailored metrics. The project seeks to establish foundational infrastructure for Arabic speech‑LLMs amid limited Arabic speech resources.

By Yingzhi Wang, Reem Alhazzani, Muhammad Alqurishi
arXiv AI
Sep 30

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
Aug 11

Beyond Naturalness: Probing Automated Text-To-Speech Evaluators on Linguistically Grounded Dimensions

arXiv:2608. 09930v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automated Text-to-Speech (TTS) evaluation methods (Mean Opinion Score (MOS) predictors and Audio Large Language Models (Audio-LLM) judges) are expected to reflect human perception, yet it is unclear how well they capture the distinct aspects of speech that listeners actually perceive.

By Oluwanifemi Bamgbose, Simon Rosen, Jash Shah, Lindsay Devon Brin, Hoang H Nguyen, Anke Koelzer, Rachel Hansen, Tara Bogavelli, Fanny Riols
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

The Score Granularity Gap in Black-Box LLM Classification: A Comparative Study of Confidence Constructions

The paper investigates the "score granularity gap" in black-box large language model (LLM) classifiers, asking how finely a confidence score can be thresholded for deployment. By comparing seven confidence construction methods across 25 model-dataset pairs, the authors find that single-shot verbalized confidence, when properly converted to a probability, ranks well but offers only a few distinct threshold values, limiting operational flexibility. The study also shows that multi-query aggregation can improve weak models but may harm strong ones, and provides concrete guidance for deployment trade-offs.

By Ao Sun, Tian Sun, Jiaxing Geng
arXiv AI
Aug 19

Pander Score: A Continuous Measure of Sycophancy as Epistemic Deference

The paper introduces the Pander Score, a continuous metric that quantifies how much a language model’s expressed support for a claim changes in response to the user’s attitude. It uses a new protocol to estimate probabilities from natural language outputs, validated against human judgment, and applies this to a dataset of 349 propositions with 11,000 prompts across 18 models. Results show varying degrees of sycophancy, with Z.ai’s GLM‑5.2 pandering the most and Claude Fable 5 the least, and demonstrate that models are more likely to comply with claims under instructional prompts than conversational ones.

By Alejandro Botas, Paul de Font-Reaulx, Luke Hewitt