Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Whitehouse, Chenxi, Ruder, Sebastian, Lin, Tony, Kurylo, Oksana, Takagi, Haruka, Lam, Janice, Busetto, Nicolò, Diaz, Denise, Guzmán, Francisco
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26601
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911475075907584
author Whitehouse, Chenxi
Ruder, Sebastian
Lin, Tony
Kurylo, Oksana
Takagi, Haruka
Lam, Janice
Busetto, Nicolò
Diaz, Denise
Guzmán, Francisco
author_facet Whitehouse, Chenxi
Ruder, Sebastian
Lin, Tony
Kurylo, Oksana
Takagi, Haruka
Lam, Janice
Busetto, Nicolò
Diaz, Denise
Guzmán, Francisco
contents Ensuring native-like quality of large language model (LLM) responses across many languages is challenging. To address this, we introduce MENLO, a framework that operationalizes the evaluation of native-like response quality based on audience design-inspired mechanisms. Using MENLO, we create a dataset of 6,423 human-annotated prompt-response preference pairs covering four quality dimensions with high inter-annotator agreement in 47 language varieties. Our evaluation reveals that zero-shot LLM judges benefit significantly from pairwise evaluation and our structured annotation rubrics, yet they still underperform human annotators on our dataset. We demonstrate substantial improvements through fine-tuning with reinforcement learning, reward shaping, and multi-task learning approaches. Additionally, we show that RL-trained judges can serve as generative reward models to enhance LLMs' multilingual proficiency, though discrepancies with human judgment remain. Our findings suggest promising directions for scalable multilingual evaluation and preference alignment. We release our dataset and evaluation framework to support further research in multilingual LLM evaluation (https://huggingface.co/datasets/facebook/menlo).
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_26601
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle MENLO: From Preferences to Proficiency -- Evaluating and Modeling Native-like Quality Across 47 Languages
Whitehouse, Chenxi
Ruder, Sebastian
Lin, Tony
Kurylo, Oksana
Takagi, Haruka
Lam, Janice
Busetto, Nicolò
Diaz, Denise
Guzmán, Francisco
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Ensuring native-like quality of large language model (LLM) responses across many languages is challenging. To address this, we introduce MENLO, a framework that operationalizes the evaluation of native-like response quality based on audience design-inspired mechanisms. Using MENLO, we create a dataset of 6,423 human-annotated prompt-response preference pairs covering four quality dimensions with high inter-annotator agreement in 47 language varieties. Our evaluation reveals that zero-shot LLM judges benefit significantly from pairwise evaluation and our structured annotation rubrics, yet they still underperform human annotators on our dataset. We demonstrate substantial improvements through fine-tuning with reinforcement learning, reward shaping, and multi-task learning approaches. Additionally, we show that RL-trained judges can serve as generative reward models to enhance LLMs' multilingual proficiency, though discrepancies with human judgment remain. Our findings suggest promising directions for scalable multilingual evaluation and preference alignment. We release our dataset and evaluation framework to support further research in multilingual LLM evaluation (https://huggingface.co/datasets/facebook/menlo).
title MENLO: From Preferences to Proficiency -- Evaluating and Modeling Native-like Quality Across 47 Languages
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.26601