Jin Mao

Jie Meng, Jin Mao

Large language models (LLMs) are predominantly used as evaluators for natural language generation (NLG) tasks, but their application to broader evaluation scenarios remains limited. In this work, we explore the potential of LLMs as general evaluators across diverse tasks. Although LLM-based evaluators have made progress in different areas, existing methods struggle to generalize due to their reliance on costly, human-designed evaluation principles, which are often misaligned with both annotated data and LLMs' understanding.To address these challenges, we propose a rule-augmented evaluation paradigm. First, we introduce a rule distillation method that automatically extracts scoring rules from data using an LLM-assisted Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), alleviating scalability issues and improving alignment with data. Second, to enable LLMs to effectively apply the learned rules, we propose two strategies: (1) Chain-of-Rule (CoR), which guides LLM to follow distilled rules, and (2) training a rule-augmented LLM evaluator (RuAE) via reinforcement learning, further bridging the gap between rules and LLMs' reasoning. Extensive experiments on diverse tasks demonstrate the effectiveness and generalizability of our approach across various evaluation scenarios.

Tong Bao, Yi Zhao, Jin Mao et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT, have prompted academic concerns about their impact on academic writing. Existing studies have primarily examined LLM usage in academic writing through quantitative approaches, such as word frequency statistics and probability-based analyses. However, few have systematically examined the potential impact of LLMs on the linguistic characteristics of academic writing. To address this gap, we conducted a large-scale analysis across 823,798 abstracts published in last decade from arXiv dataset. Through the linguistic analysis of features such as the frequency of LLM-preferred words, lexical complexity, syntactic complexity, cohesion, readability and sentiment, the results indicate a significant increase in the proportion of LLM-preferred words in abstracts, revealing the widespread influence of LLMs on academic writing. Additionally, we observed an increase in lexical complexity and sentiment in the abstracts, but a decrease in syntactic complexity, suggesting that LLMs introduce more new vocabulary and simplify sentence structure. However, the significant decrease in cohesion and readability indicates that abstracts have fewer connecting words and are becoming more difficult to read. Moreover, our analysis reveals that scholars with weaker English proficiency were more likely to use the LLMs for academic writing, and focused on improving the overall logic and fluency of the abstracts. Finally, at discipline level, we found that scholars in Computer Science showed more pronounced changes in writing style, while the changes in Mathematics were minimal.