Muyun Yang

Xinnian Liang, Zefan Zhou, Hui Huang et al.

Pretrained language models (PLMs) have shown marvelous improvements across various NLP tasks. Most Chinese PLMs simply treat an input text as a sequence of characters, and completely ignore word information. Although Whole Word Masking can alleviate this, the semantics in words is still not well represented. In this paper, we revisit the segmentation granularity of Chinese PLMs. We propose a mixed-granularity Chinese BERT (MigBERT) by considering both characters and words. To achieve this, we design objective functions for learning both character and word-level representations. We conduct extensive experiments on various Chinese NLP tasks to evaluate existing PLMs as well as the proposed MigBERT. Experimental results show that MigBERT achieves new SOTA performance on all these tasks. Further analysis demonstrates that words are semantically richer than characters. More interestingly, we show that MigBERT also works with Japanese. Our code and model have been released here~\footnote{https://github.com/xnliang98/MigBERT}.

Hongli Zhou, Hui Huang, Yunfei Long et al.

Recently, there has been a trend of evaluating the Large Language Model (LLM) quality in the flavor of LLM-as-a-Judge, namely leveraging another LLM to evaluate the current output quality. However, existing judges are proven to be biased, namely they would favor answers which present better superficial quality (such as verbosity, fluency) while ignoring the instruction following ability. In this work, we propose systematic research about the bias of LLM-as-a-Judge. Specifically, for closed-source judge models, we apply calibration to mitigate the significance of superficial quality, both on probability level and prompt level. For open-source judge models, we propose to mitigate the bias by contrastive training, with curated negative samples that deviate from instruction but present better superficial quality. We apply our methods on the bias evaluation benchmark, and experiment results show our methods mitigate the bias by a large margin while maintaining a satisfactory evaluation accuracy.

Mufan Xu, Kehai Chen, Jiahao Hu et al.

Emotional support plays an important role in dialogue systems, and its success depends on adapting to a user's evolving and implicit needs across multi-turn interactions while leveraging the strong reasoning capacity of large language models. However, since signals about user needs are often weak, indirect, and can only be disambiguated through multi-turn interaction, existing emotional support methods often struggle to acquire and generalize relevant conversational knowledge efficiently. To bridge this gap, we introduce User-Aware Active Knowledge Acquisition (UKA), a gradient-free active dialogue learning framework that explicitly represents uncertainty about user needs and incorporates active learning into both knowledge acquisition and response selection.We propose a Theory-of-Mind uncertainty estimation mechanism that allows the model to prioritize responses, thereby eliciting more informative user feedback. UKA is capable of efficiently exploring user-aligned conversational knowledge during training while maintaining robustness at test time. Experiments across multiple dialogue benchmarks and model architectures demonstrate that our approach consistently outperforms strong baselines in dialogue quality and user alignment.

Andong Chen, Lianzhang Lou, Kehai Chen et al.

Different from the traditional translation tasks, classical Chinese poetry translation requires both adequacy and fluency in translating culturally and historically significant content and linguistic poetic elegance. Large language models (LLMs) with impressive multilingual capabilities may bring a ray of hope to achieve this extreme translation demand. This paper first introduces a suitable benchmark (PoetMT) where each Chinese poetry has a recognized elegant translation. Meanwhile, we propose a new metric based on GPT-4 to evaluate the extent to which current LLMs can meet these demands. Our empirical evaluation reveals that the existing LLMs fall short in the challenging task. Hence, we propose a Retrieval-Augmented Machine Translation (RAT) method which incorporates knowledge related to classical poetry for advancing the translation of Chinese Poetry in LLMs. Experimental results show that RAT consistently outperforms all comparison methods regarding wildly used BLEU, COMET, BLEURT, our proposed metric, and human evaluation.

Hui Huang, Xingyuan Bu, Hongli Zhou et al.

Recently, there has been a growing trend of utilizing Large Language Model (LLM) to evaluate the quality of other LLMs. Many studies have fine-tuned judge models based on open-source LLMs for evaluation. While the fine-tuned judge models are claimed to achieve comparable evaluation capability with GPT-4, in this work, we conduct an empirical study of LLM-as-a-Judge. Our findings indicate that although the fine-tuned judge models achieve high performance on in-domain test sets, even surpassing GPT-4, they underperform GPT-4 across several dimensions, including generalizability, fairness and adaptability. We also reveal that the fine-tuned judge model inherently operates as a task-specific classifier, consequently imposing the limitations.

Hongli Zhou, Hui Huang, Wei Liu et al.

Reward models (RMs) play a pivotal role in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Due to the difficulty of obtaining high-quality human preference annotations, distilling preferences from generative LLMs has emerged as a standard practice. However, existing approaches predominantly treat teacher models as simple binary annotators, failing to fully exploit the rich knowledge and capabilities for RM distillation. To address this, we propose RM-Distiller, a framework designed to systematically exploit the multifaceted capabilities of teacher LLMs: (1) Refinement capability, which synthesizes highly correlated response pairs to create fine-grained and contrastive signals. (2) Scoring capability, which guides the RM in capturing precise preference strength via a margin-aware optimization objective. (3) Generation capability, which incorporates the teacher's generative distribution to regularize the RM to preserve its fundamental linguistic knowledge. Extensive experiments demonstrate that RM-Distiller significantly outperforms traditional distillation methods both on RM benchmarks and reinforcement learning-based alignment, proving that exploiting multifaceted teacher capabilities is critical for effective reward modeling. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic research on RM distillation from generative LLMs.

Junkai Liu, Yujie Tong, Hui Huang et al.

Legal judgment prediction (LJP), which enables litigants and their lawyers to forecast judgment outcomes and refine litigation strategies, has emerged as a crucial legal NLP task. Existing studies typically utilize legal facts, i.e., facts that have been established by evidence and determined by the judge, to predict the judgment. However, legal facts are often difficult to obtain in the early stages of litigation, significantly limiting the practical applicability of fact-based LJP. To address this limitation, we propose a novel legal NLP task: legal fact prediction (LFP), which takes the evidence submitted by litigants for trial as input to predict legal facts, thereby empowering fact-based LJP technologies to make predictions in the absence of ground-truth legal facts. We also propose the first benchmark dataset, LFPBench, for evaluating the LFP task. Our extensive experiments on LFPBench demonstrate the effectiveness of LFP-empowered LJP and highlight promising research directions for LFP.

Hui Huang, Jiaheng Liu, Yancheng He et al.

Complex instruction-following with elaborate constraints is imperative for Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing methods have constructed data for complex instruction alignment, they all rely on a more advanced model, especially GPT-4, limiting their application. In this paper, we propose a Multi-granularity Self-Contrastive Training (MuSC) framework, to improve the complex instruction alignment without relying on a stronger model. Our method is conducted on both coarse and fine granularity. On coarse-granularity, we construct constraint-aware preference data based on instruction decomposition and recombination. On fine-granularity, we perform token-aware preference optimization with dynamic token-level supervision. Our method is evaluated on open-sourced models, and experiment results show our method achieves significant improvement on both complex and general instruction-following benchmarks, surpassing previous self-alignment methods.

Hui Huang, Yingqi Qu, Jing Liu et al.

The proliferation of open-source Large Language Models (LLMs) underscores the pressing need for evaluation methods. Existing works primarily rely on external evaluators, focusing on training and prompting strategies. However, a crucial aspect, model-aware glass-box features, is overlooked. In this study, we explore the utility of glass-box features under the scenario of self-evaluation, namely applying an LLM to evaluate its own output. We investigate various glass-box feature groups and discovered that the softmax distribution serves as a reliable quality indicator for self-evaluation. Experimental results on public benchmarks validate the feasibility of self-evaluation of LLMs using glass-box features.

Xiangyu Lu, Wang Xu, Haoyu Wang et al.

Real-time speech conversation is essential for natural and efficient human-machine interactions, requiring duplex and streaming capabilities. Traditional Transformer-based conversational chatbots operate in a turn-based manner and exhibit quadratic computational complexity that grows as the input size increases. In this paper, we propose DuplexMamba, a Mamba-based end-to-end multimodal duplex model for speech-to-text conversation. DuplexMamba enables simultaneous input processing and output generation, dynamically adjusting to support real-time streaming. Specifically, we develop a Mamba-based speech encoder and adapt it with a Mamba-based language model. Furthermore, we introduce a novel duplex decoding strategy that enables DuplexMamba to process input and generate output simultaneously. Experimental results demonstrate that DuplexMamba successfully implements duplex and streaming capabilities while achieving performance comparable to several recently developed Transformer-based models in automatic speech recognition (ASR) tasks and voice assistant benchmark evaluations. Our code and model are released.

Andong Chen, Wenxin Zhu, Qiuyu Ding et al.

Chain-of-Thought reasoning has driven large language models to extend from thinking with text to thinking with images and videos. However, different modalities still have clear limitations: static images struggle to represent temporal structure, while videos introduce substantial redundancy and computational cost. In this work, we propose Thinking with Comics, a visual reasoning paradigm that uses comics as a high information-density medium positioned between images and videos. Comics preserve temporal structure, embedded text, and narrative coherence while requiring significantly lower reasoning cost. We systematically study two reasoning paths based on comics and evaluate them on a range of reasoning tasks and long-context understanding tasks. Experimental results show that Thinking with Comics outperforms Thinking with Images on multi-step temporal and causal reasoning tasks, while remaining substantially more efficient than Thinking with Video. Further analysis indicates that different comic narrative structures and styles consistently affect performance across tasks, suggesting that comics serve as an effective intermediate visual representation for improving multimodal reasoning.

Mufan Xu, Kehai Chen, Xuefeng Bai et al.

Existing policy-gradient methods for auto-regressive language models typically select subsequent tokens one at a time as actions in the policy. While effective for many generation tasks, such an approach may not fully capture the structure of complex reasoning tasks, where a single semantic decision is often realized across multiple tokens--for example, when defining variables or composing equations. This introduces a potential mismatch between token-level optimization and the inherently block-level nature of reasoning in these settings. To bridge this gap, we propose Multi-token Policy Gradient Optimization (MPO), a framework that treats sequences of K consecutive tokens as unified semantic actions. This block-level perspective enables our method to capture the compositional structure of reasoning trajectories and supports optimization over coherent, higher-level objectives. Experiments on mathematical reasoning and coding benchmarks show that MPO outperforms standard token-level policy gradient baselines, highlight the limitations of token-level policy gradients for complex reasoning, motivating future research to look beyond token-level granularity for reasoning-intensive language tasks.

Shaoqing Zhang, Zhuosheng Zhang, Kehai Chen et al.

Despite being empowered with alignment mechanisms, large language models (LLMs) are increasingly vulnerable to emerging jailbreak attacks that can compromise their alignment mechanisms. This vulnerability poses significant risks to real-world applications. Existing work faces challenges in both training efficiency and generalization capabilities (i.e., Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback and Red-Teaming). Developing effective strategies to enable LLMs to resist continuously evolving jailbreak attempts represents a significant challenge. To address this challenge, we propose a novel defensive paradigm called GuidelineLLM, which assists LLMs in recognizing queries that may have harmful content. Before LLMs respond to a query, GuidelineLLM first identifies potential risks associated with the query, summarizes these risks into guideline suggestions, and then feeds these guidelines to the responding LLMs. Importantly, our approach eliminates the necessity for additional safety fine-tuning of the LLMs themselves; only the GuidelineLLM requires fine-tuning. This characteristic enhances the general applicability of GuidelineLLM across various LLMs. Experimental results demonstrate that GuidelineLLM can significantly reduce the attack success rate (ASR) against LLM (an average reduction of 34.17\% ASR) while maintaining the usefulness of LLM in handling benign queries. The code is available at https://github.com/sqzhang-lazy/GuidelineLLM.

Yuchen Song, Andong Chen, Wenxin Zhu et al.

Cultural awareness capabilities has emerged as a critical capability for Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs). However, current benchmarks lack progressed difficulty in their task design and are deficient in cross-lingual tasks. Moreover, current benchmarks often use real-world images. Each real-world image typically contains one culture, making these benchmarks relatively easy for MLLMs. Based on this, we propose C$^3$B ($\textbf{C}$omics $\textbf{C}$ross-$\textbf{C}$ultural $\textbf{B}$enchmark), a novel multicultural, multitask and multilingual cultural awareness capabilities benchmark. C$^3$B comprises over 2000 images and over 18000 QA pairs, constructed on three tasks with progressed difficulties, from basic visual recognition to higher-level cultural conflict understanding, and finally to cultural content generation. We conducted evaluations on 11 open-source MLLMs, revealing a significant performance gap between MLLMs and human performance. The gap demonstrates that C$^3$B poses substantial challenges for current MLLMs, encouraging future research to advance the cultural awareness capabilities of MLLMs.

Hui Huang, Xuanxin Wu, Muyun Yang et al.

This paper presents the first systematic comparison investigating whether Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are superior judge to non-reasoning LLMs. Our empirical analysis yields four key findings: 1) LRMs outperform non-reasoning LLMs in terms of judgment accuracy, particularly on reasoning-intensive tasks; 2) LRMs demonstrate superior instruction-following capabilities in evaluation contexts; 3) LRMs exhibit enhanced robustness against adversarial attacks targeting judgment tasks; 4) However, LRMs still exhibit strong biases in superficial quality. To improve the robustness against biases, we propose PlanJudge, an evaluation strategy that prompts the model to generate an explicit evaluation plan before execution. Despite its simplicity, our experiments demonstrate that PlanJudge significantly mitigates biases in both LRMs and standard LLMs.

Hongyun Zhou, Xiangyu Lu, Wang Xu et al.

Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) is currently the most commonly used Parameter-efficient fine-tuning (PEFT) method, it introduces auxiliary parameters for each layer to fine-tune the pre-trained model under limited computing resources. However, it still faces resource consumption challenges during training when scaling up to larger models. Most previous studies have tackled this issue by using pruning techniques, which involve removing LoRA parameters deemed unimportant. Nonetheless, these efforts only analyze LoRA parameter features to evaluate their importance, such as parameter count, size, and gradient. In fact, the output of LoRA (product of LoRA parameter and hidden state), directly impacts the final results. Preliminary experiments indicate that a fraction of LoRA elements possesses significantly high output values, substantially influencing the layer output. Motivated by the observation, we propose LoRA-drop. Concretely, LoRA-drop evaluates the importance of LoRA based on the LoRA output. Then we retain LoRA for important layers and the other layers share the same LoRA. We conduct abundant experiments with models of different scales on NLU and NLG tasks. Results demonstrate that LoRA-drop can achieve performance comparable to full fine-tuning and LoRA, while retaining 50\% of the LoRA parameters on average.

Hui Huang, Muyun Yang, Yuki Arase

Despite the significant advancements of Large Language Models (LLMs), their factuality remains a critical challenge, fueling growing interest in factuality verification. Existing research on factuality verification primarily conducts binary judgments (e.g., correct or incorrect), which fails to distinguish varying degrees of error severity. This limits its utility for applications such as fine-grained evaluation and preference optimization. To bridge this gap, we propose the Agentic Discriminative Verifier (DiVA), a hybrid framework that synergizes the agentic search capabilities of generative models with the precise scoring aptitude of discriminative models. We also construct a new benchmark, FGVeriBench, as a robust testbed for fine-grained factuality verification. Experimental results on FGVeriBench demonstrate that our DiVA significantly outperforms existing methods on factuality verification for both general and multi-hop questions.

Andong Chen, Yuchen Song, Wenxin Zhu et al.

The o1-Like LLMs are transforming AI by simulating human cognitive processes, but their performance in multilingual machine translation (MMT) remains underexplored. This study examines: (1) how o1-Like LLMs perform in MMT tasks and (2) what factors influence their translation quality. We evaluate multiple o1-Like LLMs and compare them with traditional models like ChatGPT and GPT-4o. Results show that o1-Like LLMs establish new multilingual translation benchmarks, with DeepSeek-R1 surpassing GPT-4o in contextless tasks. They demonstrate strengths in historical and cultural translation but exhibit a tendency for rambling issues in Chinese-centric outputs. Further analysis reveals three key insights: (1) High inference costs and slower processing speeds make complex translation tasks more resource-intensive. (2) Translation quality improves with model size, enhancing commonsense reasoning and cultural translation. (3) The temperature parameter significantly impacts output quality-lower temperatures yield more stable and accurate translations, while higher temperatures reduce coherence and precision.

Andong Chen, Kehai Chen, Yang Xiang et al.

The remarkable understanding and generation capabilities of large language models (LLMs) have greatly improved translation performance. However, incorrect understanding of the sentence to be translated can degrade translation quality. To address this issue, we proposed a novel Iterative Bilingual Understanding Translation (IBUT) method based on the cross-lingual capabilities of LLMs and the dual characteristics of translation tasks. The cross-lingual capability of LLMs enables the generation of contextual understanding for both the source and target languages separately. Furthermore, the dual characteristics allow IBUT to generate effective cross-lingual feedback, iteratively refining contextual understanding, thereby reducing errors and improving translation performance. Experimental results showed that the proposed IBUT outperforms several strong comparison methods, especially being generalized to multiple domains (e.g., news, commonsense, and cultural translation benchmarks).

Mufan Xu, Kehai Chen, Xuefeng Bai et al.

Large language models (LLMs) based on generative pre-trained Transformer have achieved remarkable performance on knowledge graph question-answering (KGQA) tasks. However, LLMs often produce ungrounded subgraph planning or reasoning results in KGQA due to the hallucinatory behavior brought by the generative paradigm. To tackle this issue, we propose READS to reformulate the KGQA process into discriminative subtasks, which simplifies the search space for each subtasks. Based on the subtasks, we design a new corresponding discriminative inference strategy to conduct the reasoning for KGQA, thereby alleviating hallucination and ungrounded reasoning issues in LLMs. Experimental results show that the proposed approach outperforms multiple strong comparison methods, along with achieving state-of-the-art performance on widely used benchmarks WebQSP and CWQ.

Hongli Zhou, Hui Huang, Ziqing Zhao et al.

The evaluation of large language models (LLMs) via benchmarks is widespread, yet inconsistencies between different leaderboards and poor separability among top models raise concerns about their ability to accurately reflect authentic model capabilities. This paper provides a critical analysis of benchmark effectiveness, examining mainstream prominent LLM benchmarks using results from diverse models. We first propose Pseudo-Siamese Network for Item Response Theory (PSN-IRT), an enhanced Item Response Theory framework that incorporates a rich set of item parameters within an IRT-grounded architecture. PSN-IRT can be utilized for accurate and reliable estimations of item characteristics and model abilities. Based on PSN-IRT, we conduct extensive analysis on 11 LLM benchmarks comprising 41,871 items, revealing significant and varied shortcomings in their measurement quality. Furthermore, we demonstrate that leveraging PSN-IRT is able to construct smaller benchmarks while maintaining stronger alignment with human preference.

Mufan Xu, Gewen Liang, Kehai Chen et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on knowledge graph question answering (KGQA) tasks by planning and interacting with knowledge graphs. However, existing methods often confuse tool utilization with knowledge reasoning, harming readability of model outputs and giving rise to hallucinatory tool invocations, which hinder the advancement of KGQA. To address this issue, we propose Memory-augmented Query Reconstruction for LLM-based Knowledge Graph Reasoning (MemQ) to decouple LLM from tool invocation tasks using LLM-built query memory. By establishing a memory module with explicit descriptions of query statements, the proposed MemQ facilitates the KGQA process with natural language reasoning and memory-augmented query reconstruction. Meanwhile, we design an effective and readable reasoning to enhance the LLM's reasoning capability in KGQA. Experimental results that MemQ achieves state-of-the-art performance on widely used benchmarks WebQSP and CWQ.

Andong Chen, Yuchen Song, Kehai Chen et al.

Visual information has been introduced for enhancing machine translation (MT), and its effectiveness heavily relies on the availability of large amounts of bilingual parallel sentence pairs with manual image annotations. In this paper, we introduce a stable diffusion-based imagination network into a multimodal large language model (MLLM) to explicitly generate an image for each source sentence, thereby advancing the multimodel MT. Particularly, we build heuristic human feedback with reinforcement learning to ensure the consistency of the generated image with the source sentence without the supervision of image annotation, which breaks the bottleneck of using visual information in MT. Furthermore, the proposed method enables imaginative visual information to be integrated into large-scale text-only MT in addition to multimodal MT. Experimental results show that our model significantly outperforms existing multimodal MT and text-only MT, especially achieving an average improvement of more than 14 BLEU points on Multi30K multimodal MT benchmarks.

Hui Huang, Yancheng He, Wei Liu et al.

The widespread adoption of reinforcement learning-based alignment highlights the growing importance of reward models. Various benchmarks have been built to evaluate reward models in various domains and scenarios. However, a significant gap remains in assessing reward models for long-form generation, despite its critical role in real-world applications. To bridge this, we introduce Long-form RewardBench, the first reward modeling testbed specifically designed for long-form generation. Our benchmark encompasses five key subtasks: QA, RAG, Chat, Writing, and Reasoning. We collected instruction and preference data through a meticulously designed multi-stage data collection process, and conducted extensive experiments on 20+ mainstream reward models, including both classifiers and generative models. Our findings reveal that current models still lack long-form reward modeling capabilities. Furthermore, we designed a novel Long-form Needle-in-a-Haystack Test, which revealed a correlation between reward modeling performance and the error's position within a response, as well as the overall response length, with distinct characteristics observed between classification and generative models. Finally, we demonstrate that classifiers exhibit better generalizability compared to generative models trained on the same data. As the first benchmark for long-form reward modeling, this work aims to offer a robust platform for visualizing progress in this crucial area.

Dongxu Liu, Bing Xu, Yinzhuo Chen et al.

Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) has been proven to be an effective method for preference alignment of large language models (LLMs) and is widely used in the post-training process of LLMs. However, RLHF struggles with handling multiple competing preferences. This leads to a decrease in the alignment of LLMs with human preferences. To address this issue, we propose Preference Mixture of LoRAs (PMoL) from the perspective of model architecture, which can adapt to any number of preferences to mix. PMoL combines Mixture of Experts (MoE) and Low Rank Adaptor (LoRA). This architecture is innovatively applied to the research of preference alignment and has achieved significant performance improvement. The expert group soft loss is used to enable MoE with the ability to mix preferences. Through comprehensive evaluation by the reward model and GPT-4o, the experiment results show that PMoL has superior preference mixing capabilities compared to baseline methods. PMoL achieves better preference alignment with lower training costs.

Hongli Zhou, Hui Huang, Rui Zhang et al.

Large language model (LLM)-based judges are widely adopted for automated evaluation and reward modeling, yet their judgments are often affected by judgment biases. Accurately evaluating these biases is essential for ensuring the reliability of LLM-based judges. However, existing studies typically investigate limited biases under a single judge formulation, either generative or discriminative, lacking a comprehensive evaluation. To bridge this gap, we propose JudgeBiasBench, a benchmark for systematically quantifying biases in LLM-based judges. JudgeBiasBench defines a taxonomy of judgment biases across 4 dimensions, and constructs bias-augmented evaluation instances through a controlled bias injection pipeline, covering 12 representative bias types. We conduct extensive experiments across both generative and discriminative judges, revealing that current judges exhibit significant and diverse bias patterns that often compromise the reliability of automated evaluation. To mitigate judgment bias, we propose bias-aware training that explicitly incorporates bias-related attributes into the training process, encouraging judges to disentangle task-relevant quality from bias-correlated cues. By adopting reinforcement learning for generative judges and contrastive learning for discriminative judges, our methods effectively reduce judgment biases while largely preserving general evaluation capability.

Yihong Tang, Kehai Chen, Muyun Yang et al.

The advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has spurred significant interest in Role-Playing Agents (RPAs) for applications such as emotional companionship and virtual interaction. However, recent RPAs are often built on explicit dialogue data, lacking deep, human-like internal thought processes, resulting in superficial knowledge and style expression. While Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) can be employed to simulate character thought, their direct application is hindered by attention diversion (i.e., RPAs forget their role) and style drift (i.e., overly formal and rigid reasoning rather than character-consistent reasoning). To address these challenges, this paper introduces a novel Role-Aware Reasoning (RAR) method, which consists of two important stages: Role Identity Activation (RIA) and Reasoning Style Optimization (RSO). RIA explicitly guides the model with character profiles during reasoning to counteract attention diversion, and then RSO aligns reasoning style with the character and scene via LRM distillation to mitigate style drift. Extensive experiments demonstrate that the proposed RAR significantly enhances the performance of RPAs by effectively addressing attention diversion and style drift.

Ruili Jiang, Kehai Chen, Xuefeng Bai et al.

The recent surge of versatile large language models (LLMs) largely depends on aligning increasingly capable foundation models with human intentions by preference learning, enhancing LLMs with excellent applicability and effectiveness in a wide range of contexts. Despite the numerous related studies conducted, a perspective on how human preferences are introduced into LLMs remains limited, which may prevent a deeper comprehension of the relationships between human preferences and LLMs as well as the realization of their limitations. In this survey, we review the progress in exploring human preference learning for LLMs from a preference-centered perspective, covering the sources and formats of preference feedback, the modeling and usage of preference signals, as well as the evaluation of the aligned LLMs. We first categorize the human feedback according to data sources and formats. We then summarize techniques for human preferences modeling and compare the advantages and disadvantages of different schools of models. Moreover, we present various preference usage methods sorted by the objectives to utilize human preference signals. Finally, we summarize some prevailing approaches to evaluate LLMs in terms of alignment with human intentions and discuss our outlooks on the human intention alignment for LLMs.

Andong Chen, Lianzhang Lou, Kehai Chen et al.

Recently, large language models (LLMs) enhanced by self-reflection have achieved promising performance on machine translation. The key idea is guiding LLMs to generate translation with human-like feedback. However, existing self-reflection methods lack effective feedback information, limiting the translation performance. To address this, we introduce a DUAL-REFLECT framework, leveraging the dual learning of translation tasks to provide effective feedback, thereby enhancing the models' self-reflective abilities and improving translation performance. The application of this method across various translation tasks has proven its effectiveness in improving translation accuracy and eliminating ambiguities, especially in translation tasks with low-resource language pairs.