@inproceedings{harada-oseki-2025-cognitive,
    title = "Cognitive Feedback: Decoding Human Feedback from Cognitive Signals",
    author = "Harada, Yuto  and
      Oseki, Yohei",
    editor = "Blodgett, Su Lin  and
      Curry, Amanda Cercas  and
      Dev, Sunipa  and
      Li, Siyan  and
      Madaio, Michael  and
      Wang, Jack  and
      Wu, Sherry Tongshuang  and
      Xiao, Ziang  and
      Yang, Diyi",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Bridging Human-Computer Interaction and Natural Language Processing (HCI+NLP)",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.hcinlp-1.17/",
    pages = "209--219",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-353-1",
    abstract = "Alignment methods such as Direct Preference Optimization (DPO) have played a crucial role in enhancing the performance of large language models. However, conventional approaches typically require creating large amounts of explicit preference labels, which is costly, time-consuming, and demands sustained human attention.In this work, we propose Cognitive Preference Optimization (CPO), a novel alignment method that infers preferences from electroencephalography (EEG) signals recorded while annotators simply read text, eliminating the need for explicit labeling. To our knowledge, this is the first empirical investigation of EEG-based feedback as an alternative to conventional human annotations for aligning language models.Experiments on controlled sentiment generation show that CPO achieves performance comparable to explicit human feedback, suggesting that brain-signal-derived preferences can provide a viable, lower-burden pathway for language model alignment."
}