Noah Lee


2025

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Evaluating the Consistency of LLM Evaluators
Noah Lee | Jiwoo Hong | James Thorne
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics

Large language models (LLMs) have shown potential as general evaluators along with the evident benefits of speed and cost. While their correlation against human annotators has been widely studied, consistency as evaluators is still understudied, raising concerns about the reliability of LLM evaluators. In this paper, we conduct extensive studies on the two aspects of consistency in LLM evaluations, Self-Consistency (SC) and Inter-scale Consistency (IC), on different scoring scales and criterion granularity with open-source and proprietary models. Our comprehensive analysis demonstrates that strong proprietary models are not necessarily consistent evaluators, highlighting the importance of considering consistency in assessing the capability of LLM evaluators.

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The BiGGen Bench: A Principled Benchmark for Fine-grained Evaluation of Language Models with Language Models
Seungone Kim | Juyoung Suk | Ji Yong Cho | Shayne Longpre | Chaeeun Kim | Dongkeun Yoon | Guijin Son | Yejin Cho | Sheikh Shafayat | Jinheon Baek | Sue Hyun Park | Hyeonbin Hwang | Jinkyung Jo | Hyowon Cho | Haebin Shin | Seongyun Lee | Hanseok Oh | Noah Lee | Namgyu Ho | Se June Joo | Miyoung Ko | Yoonjoo Lee | Hyungjoo Chae | Jamin Shin | Joel Jang | Seonghyeon Ye | Bill Yuchen Lin | Sean Welleck | Graham Neubig | Moontae Lee | Kyungjae Lee | Minjoon Seo
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

As language models (LMs) become capable of handling a wide range of tasks, their evaluation is becoming as challenging as their development. Most generation benchmarks currently assess LMs using abstract evaluation criteria-like helpfulness and harmlessness-which often lack the flexibility and granularity of human assessment. Additionally, these benchmarks tend to focus disproportionately on specific capabilities such as instruction following, leading to coverage bias. To overcome these limitations, we introduce the BiGGen Bench, a principled generation benchmark designed to thoroughly evaluate nine distinct capabilities of LMs across 77 diverse tasks. A key feature of the BiGGen Bench is its use of instance-specific evaluation criteria, closely mirroring the nuanced discernment of human evaluation. We apply this benchmark to assess 100 frontier LMs using five evaluator LMs. Our code, data, and evaluation results are all publicly available at https://github.com/prometheus-eval/prometheus-eval.

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Cross-lingual Transfer of Reward Models in Multilingual Alignment
Jiwoo Hong | Noah Lee | Rodrigo Martínez-Castaño | César Rodríguez | James Thorne
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 2: Short Papers)

Reinforcement learning with human feedback (RLHF) is shown to largely benefit from precise reward models (RMs). However, recent studies in reward modeling schemes are skewed towards English, limiting the applicability of RLHF in multilingual alignments. In this work, we investigate the cross-lingual transfer of RMs trained in diverse languages, primarily from English. Our experimental results demonstrate the strong cross-lingual transfer of English RMs, exceeding target language RMs by 3~4% average increase in Multilingual RewardBench. Furthermore, we analyze the cross-lingual transfer of RMs through the representation shifts. Finally, we perform multilingual alignment to exemplify how cross-lingual transfer in RM propagates to enhanced multilingual instruction-following capability.

2024

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ORPO: Monolithic Preference Optimization without Reference Model
Jiwoo Hong | Noah Lee | James Thorne
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

While recent preference alignment algorithms for language models have demonstrated promising results, supervised fine-tuning (SFT) remains imperative for achieving successful convergence. In this paper, we revisit SFT in the context of preference alignment, emphasizing that a minor penalty for the disfavored style is sufficient for preference alignment. Building on this foundation, we introduce a straightforward reference model-free monolithic odds ratio preference optimization algorithm, ORPO, eliminating the need for an additional preference alignment phase. We demonstrate, both empirically and theoretically, that the odds ratio is a sensible choice for contrasting favored and disfavored styles during SFT across diverse sizes from 125M to 7B. Specifically, fine-tuning Phi-2 (2.7B), Llama-2 (7B), and Mistral (7B) with ORPO on the UltraFeedback alone surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art language models including Llama-2 Chat and Zephyr with more than 7B and 13B parameters: achieving up to 12.20% on AlpacaEval 2.0 (Figure 1), and 7.32 in MT-Bench (Table 2). We release code and model checkpoints for Mistral-ORPO-𝛼 (7B) and Mistral-ORPO-𝛽 (7B).

2023

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Can Large Language Models Capture Dissenting Human Voices?
Noah Lee | Na Min An | James Thorne
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive achievements in solving a broad range of tasks. Augmented by instruction fine-tuning, LLMs have also been shown to generalize in zero-shot settings as well. However, whether LLMs closely align with the human disagreement distribution has not been well-studied, especially within the scope of natural language inference (NLI). In this paper, we evaluate the performance and alignment of LLM distribution with humans using two different techniques to estimate the multinomial distribution: Monte Carlo Estimation (MCE) and Log Probability Estimation (LPE). As a result, we show LLMs exhibit limited ability in solving NLI tasks and simultaneously fail to capture human disagreement distribution. The inference and human alignment performances plunge even further on data samples with high human disagreement levels, raising concerns about their natural language understanding (NLU) ability and their representativeness to a larger human population.