Taslim Mahbub

Taslim Mahbub, Yiding Pei, Shi Feng

Aligning AI systems with diverse human values requires value specifications grounded in concrete examples, but generating such examples without extensive human supervision remains an open challenge. We investigate what makes these examples effective, using Internal Coherence Maximization (ICM) -- which infers labels by maximizing their mutual predictability -- to generate persona-specific examples that steer a model toward a target group's values, without human supervision. Across four benchmarks spanning classification, preference, and open-ended generation, ICM-inferred in-context examples match the performance of gold labels. Crucially, coherence matters beyond individual label accuracy: with accuracy held constant, more coherent examples generalize substantially better than incoherent ones. For personas underrepresented in pretraining data, targeted human feedback on the questions where the model is least certain about a persona's values yields better generalization than the same number of labels on arbitrary questions. These results identify coherence as a key design principle for scalable value specification, leveraging the diverse human perspectives already encoded in pretrained language models.

Taslim Mahbub, Shi Feng

Language models (LMs) judges are widely used to evaluate the quality of LM outputs. Despite many advantages, LM judges display concerning biases that can impair their integrity in evaluations. One such bias is self-preference: LM judges preferring their own answers over those produced by other LMs or humans. The bias is hard to eliminate as frontier LM judges can distinguish their own outputs from those of others, even when the evaluation candidates are not labeled with their sources. In this paper, we investigate strategies to mitigate self-preference by reducing the LM judges' ability to recognize their own outputs. We apply black-box perturbations to evaluation candidates in pairwise comparison to obfuscate the authorship and reduce self-recognition. We find that perturbations as simple as synonym replacement for a few words predictably reduce self-preference. However, we also uncover fundamental challenges to eliminating the bias: when we extrapolate our perturbations to a more complete neutralization of stylistic differences between the evaluation candidates, self-preference recovers. Our findings suggest that self-recognition and self-preference can happen on many semantic levels, and complete mitigation remains challenging despite promising initial results.

Khizar Anjum, Muhammad Arbab Arshad, Kadhim Hayawi et al.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly being deployed across disciplines due to their advanced reasoning and problem solving capabilities. To measure their effectiveness, various benchmarks have been developed that measure aspects of LLM reasoning, comprehension, and problem-solving. While several surveys address LLM evaluation and benchmarks, a domain-specific analysis remains underexplored in the literature. This paper introduces a taxonomy of seven key disciplines, encompassing various domains and application areas where LLMs are extensively utilized. Additionally, we provide a comprehensive review of LLM benchmarks and survey papers within each domain, highlighting the unique capabilities of LLMs and the challenges faced in their application. Finally, we compile and categorize these benchmarks by domain to create an accessible resource for researchers, aiming to pave the way for advancements toward artificial general intelligence (AGI)