Machine Translation Digest for Aug 23 2025
Here is today's selection of cs.CL papers exploring the evolving capabilities and challenges of large language models (LLMs). These studies focus on value-setting, data-centric approaches, and the enhancement of LLMs in various applications, such as linguistic acceptability, long-term planning, and document reranking.
Decoding Alignment: A Critical Survey of LLM Development Initiatives through Value-setting and Data-centric Lens
AI Alignment, primarily in the form of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), has been a cornerstone of the post-training phase in developing Large Language Models (LLMs). It has also been a popular research topic across various disciplines beyond Computer Science, including Philosophy and Law, among others, highlighting the socio-technical challenges involved. Nonetheless, except for the computational techniques related to alignment, there has been limited focus on the broader picture: the scope of these processes, which primarily rely on the selected objectives (values), and the data collected and used to imprint such objectives into the models. This work aims to reveal how alignment is understood and applied in practice from a value-setting and data-centric perspective. For this purpose, we investigate and survey (`audit') publicly available documentation released by 6 LLM development initiatives by 5 leading organizations shaping this technology, focusing on proprietary (OpenAI's GPT, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini) and open-weight (Meta's Llama, Google's Gemma, and Alibaba's Qwen) initiatives, all published in the last 3 years. The findings are documented in detail per initiative, while there is also an overall summary concerning different aspects, mainly from a value-setting and data-centric perspective. On the basis of our findings, we discuss a series of broader related concerns.
QFrCoLA: a Quebec-French Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability Judgments
Large and Transformer-based language models perform outstandingly in various downstream tasks. However, there is limited understanding regarding how these models internalize linguistic knowledge, so various linguistic benchmarks have recently been proposed to facilitate syntactic evaluation of language models across languages. This paper introduces QFrCoLA (Quebec-French Corpus of Linguistic Acceptability Judgments), a normative binary acceptability judgments dataset comprising 25,153 in-domain and 2,675 out-of-domain sentences. Our study leverages the QFrCoLA dataset and seven other linguistic binary acceptability judgment corpora to benchmark seven language models. The results demonstrate that, on average, fine-tuned Transformer-based LM are strong baselines for most languages and that zero-shot binary classification large language models perform poorly on the task. However, for the QFrCoLA benchmark, on average, a fine-tuned Transformer-based LM outperformed other methods tested. It also shows that pre-trained cross-lingual LLMs selected for our experimentation do not seem to have acquired linguistic judgment capabilities during their pre-training for Quebec French. Finally, our experiment results on QFrCoLA show that our dataset, built from examples that illustrate linguistic norms rather than speakers' feelings, is similar to linguistic acceptability judgment; it is a challenging dataset that can benchmark LM on their linguistic judgment capabilities.
ObjexMT: Objective Extraction and Metacognitive Calibration for LLM-as-a-Judge under Multi-Turn Jailbreaks
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges of other models, yet it is unclear whether a judge can reliably infer the latent objective of the conversation it evaluates, especially when the goal is distributed across noisy, adversarial, multi-turn jailbreaks. We introduce OBJEX(MT), a benchmark that requires a model to (i) distill a transcript into a single-sentence base objective and (ii) report its own confidence. Accuracy is scored by an LLM judge using semantic similarity between extracted and gold objectives; correctness uses a single human-aligned threshold calibrated once on N=100 items (tau* = 0.61); and metacognition is evaluated with ECE, Brier score, Wrong@High-Conf, and risk-coverage curves. We evaluate gpt-4.1, claude-sonnet-4, and Qwen3-235B-A22B-FP8 on SafeMT Attack_600, SafeMTData_1K, MHJ, and CoSafe. claude-sonnet-4 attains the highest objective-extraction accuracy (0.515) and the best calibration (ECE 0.296; Brier 0.324), while gpt-4.1 and Qwen3 tie at 0.441 accuracy yet show marked overconfidence (mean confidence approx. 0.88 vs. accuracy approx. 0.44; Wrong@0.90 approx. 48-52%). Performance varies sharply across datasets (approx. 0.167-0.865), with MHJ comparatively easy and Attack_600/CoSafe harder. These results indicate that LLM judges often misinfer objectives with high confidence in multi-turn jailbreaks and suggest operational guidance: provide judges with explicit objectives when possible and use selective prediction or abstention to manage risk. We release prompts, scoring templates, and complete logs to facilitate replication and analysis.
Planning for Success: Exploring LLM Long-term Planning Capabilities in Table Understanding
Table understanding is key to addressing challenging downstream tasks such as table-based question answering and fact verification. Recent works have focused on leveraging Chain-of-Thought and question decomposition to solve complex questions requiring multiple operations on tables. However, these methods often suffer from a lack of explicit long-term planning and weak inter-step connections, leading to miss constraints within questions. In this paper, we propose leveraging the long-term planning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to enhance table understanding. Our approach enables the execution of a long-term plan, where the steps are tightly interconnected and serve the ultimate goal, an aspect that methods based on Chain-of-Thought and question decomposition lack. In addition, our method effectively minimizes the inclusion of unnecessary details in the process of solving the next short-term goals, a limitation of methods based on Chain-of-Thought. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms strong baselines and achieves state-of-the-art performance on WikiTableQuestions and TabFact datasets.
DeAR: Dual-Stage Document Reranking with Reasoning Agents via LLM Distillation
Large Language Models (LLMs) have transformed listwise document reranking by enabling global reasoning over candidate sets, yet single models often struggle to balance fine-grained relevance scoring with holistic cross-document analysis. We propose \textbf{De}ep\textbf{A}gent\textbf{R}ank (\textbf{\DeAR}), an open-source framework that decouples these tasks through a dual-stage approach, achieving superior accuracy and interpretability. In \emph{Stage 1}, we distill token-level relevance signals from a frozen 13B LLaMA teacher into a compact {3, 8}B student model using a hybrid of cross-entropy, RankNet, and KL divergence losses, ensuring robust pointwise scoring. In \emph{Stage 2}, we attach a second LoRA adapter and fine-tune on 20K GPT-4o-generated chain-of-thought permutations, enabling listwise reasoning with natural-language justifications. Evaluated on TREC-DL19/20, eight BEIR datasets, and NovelEval-2306, \DeAR surpasses open-source baselines by +5.1 nDCG@5 on DL20 and achieves 90.97 nDCG@10 on NovelEval, outperforming GPT-4 by +3.09. Without fine-tuning on Wikipedia, DeAR also excels in open-domain QA, achieving 54.29 Top-1 accuracy on Natural Questions, surpassing baselines like MonoT5, UPR, and RankGPT. Ablations confirm that dual-loss distillation ensures stable calibration, making \DeAR a highly effective and interpretable solution for modern reranking systems.\footnote{Dataset and code available at https://github.com/DataScienceUIBK/DeAR-Reranking.}.
| Curated by yukajii.com |