Arduin Findeis

Arduin Findeis, Floris Weers, Guoli Yin et al.

Pairwise preferences over model responses are widely collected to evaluate and provide feedback to large language models (LLMs). Given two alternative model responses to the same input, a human or AI annotator selects the "better" response. This approach can provide feedback for domains where other hard-coded metrics are difficult to obtain (e.g., chat response quality), thereby helping model evaluation or training. However, for some domains high-quality pairwise comparisons can be tricky to obtain - from AI and humans. For example, for responses with many factual statements, annotators may disproportionately weigh writing quality rather than underlying facts. In this work, we explore augmenting standard AI annotator systems with additional tools to improve performance on three challenging response domains: long-form factual, math and code tasks. We propose a tool-using agentic system to provide higher quality feedback on these domains. Our system uses web-search and code execution to ground itself based on external validation, independent of the LLM's internal knowledge and biases. We provide extensive experimental results evaluating our method across the three targeted response domains as well as general annotation tasks, using RewardBench (incl. AlpacaEval and LLMBar), RewardMath, as well as three new datasets for domains with saturated pre-existing datasets. Our results indicate that external tools can indeed improve performance in many, but not all, cases. More generally, our experiments highlight the sensitivity of performance to simple parameters (e.g., prompt) and the need for improved (non-saturated) annotator benchmarks. We share our code at https://github.com/apple/ml-agent-evaluator.

Arduin Findeis, Timo Kaufmann, Eyke Hüllermeier et al.

Some traits making a "good" AI model are hard to describe upfront. For example, should responses be more polite or more casual? Such traits are sometimes summarized as model character or personality. Without a clear objective, conventional benchmarks based on automatic validation struggle to measure such traits. Evaluation methods using human feedback such as Chatbot Arena have emerged as a popular alternative. These methods infer "better" personality and other desirable traits implicitly by ranking multiple model responses relative to each other. Recent issues with model releases highlight limitations of these existing opaque evaluation approaches: a major model was rolled back over sycophantic personality issues, models were observed overfitting to such feedback-based leaderboards. Despite these known issues, limited public tooling exists to explicitly evaluate model personality. We introduce Feedback Forensics: an open-source toolkit to track AI personality changes, both those encouraged by human (or AI) feedback, and those exhibited across AI models trained and evaluated on such feedback. Leveraging AI annotators, our toolkit enables investigating personality via Python API and browser app. We demonstrate the toolkit's usefulness in two steps: (A) first we analyse the personality traits encouraged in popular human feedback datasets including Chatbot Arena, MultiPref and PRISM; and (B) then use our toolkit to analyse how much popular models exhibit such traits. We release (1) our Feedback Forensics toolkit alongside (2) a web app tracking AI personality in popular models and feedback datasets as well as (3) the underlying annotation data at https://github.com/rdnfn/feedback-forensics.

Arduin Findeis, Timo Kaufmann, Eyke Hüllermeier et al.

Feedback data is widely used for fine-tuning and evaluating state-of-the-art AI models. Pairwise text preferences, where human or AI annotators select the "better" of two options, are particularly common. Such preferences are used to train (reward) models or to rank models with aggregate statistics. For many applications it is desirable to understand annotator preferences in addition to modelling them - not least because extensive prior work has shown various unintended biases in preference datasets. Yet, preference datasets remain challenging to interpret. Neither black-box reward models nor statistics can answer why one text is preferred over another. Manual interpretation of the numerous (long) response pairs is usually equally infeasible. In this paper, we introduce the Inverse Constitutional AI (ICAI) problem, formulating the interpretation of pairwise text preference data as a compression task. In constitutional AI, a set of principles (a constitution) is used to provide feedback and fine-tune AI models. ICAI inverts this process: given a feedback dataset, we aim to extract a constitution that best enables a large language model (LLM) to reconstruct the original annotations. We propose a corresponding ICAI algorithm and validate its generated constitutions quantitatively based on annotation reconstruction accuracy on several datasets: (a) synthetic feedback data with known principles; (b) AlpacaEval cross-annotated human feedback data; (c) crowdsourced Chatbot Arena data; and (d) PRISM data from diverse demographic groups. As a short and interpretable representation of the original dataset, generated constitutions have many potential use cases: help identify undesirable annotator biases, understand model performance better, scale feedback to unseen data, or adapt models to individual user or group preferences. We release the source code at https://github.com/rdnfn/icai.