Stayin' Aligned Over Time: Towards Longitudinal Human-LLM Alignment via Contextual Reflection and Privacy-Preserving Behavioral Data
Simret Araya Gebreegziabher, Allison E Sproul, Yinuo Yang, Chaoran Chen, Diego Gómez-Zará, Toby Jia-Jun Li
AI 速览：作者提出从单次交互后的即时偏好采集转向纵向、情境化的对齐测量框架，并实现浏览器系统BITE进行两周部署研究。
Current human-AI alignment and evaluation methods for large language models (LLMs) often rely on preference signals collected immediately after an interaction. This practice implicitly treats preference as static, even though many LLM-mediated decisions unfold over time and may be re-evaluated differently after real-world consequences and observed outcomes. Therefore, we argue for a methodological shift from single-moment preference elicitation to longitudinal, context-situated alignment measurement. We present a methodological framework for collecting temporally grounded alignment signals by combining (1) in-situ preference capture, (2) context-triggered follow-up preference reflection, and (3) privacy-preserving behavioral traces that help interpret preference change. As an instantiation of this methodology, we introduce BITE, a browser-based system that detects consequential LLM interactions, prompts reflection across later decision points, and supports progressive, user-controlled consent for sharing behavioral data. Through a two week longitudinal deployment study with 8 participants, our approach surfaced differences between immediate and later user preferences in accuracy, relevance and other dimensions of the LLM output. Our findings highlight the limitations of single-moment preference datasets and underscore the importance of longitudinal methods for alignment evaluation in everyday use.
Jiaju Chen, Yuxuan Lu, Jiayi Su, Chaoran Chen, Songlin Xiao, Zheng Zhang, Yun Wang, Yunyao Li 等 13 位作者
Recent advances in LLM agents have enabled complex cognitive capabilities, such as multi-step reasoning, planning, and tool use, that increasingly position these agents as collaborative partners in human workflows. Effective collaboration, however, requires collaborators to continuously maintain and align mental models of their own reasoning, partners' intentions, and shared goals during the collaborative process. Today's agents rarely develop such capabilities since they are primarily optimized for task completion rather than for maintaining the underlying mental models required for collaborative processes. Moreover, the community lacks authentic human collaboration data with action-level mental model annotations that could guide agents toward collaborative competence. To bridge this gap, we present ALMANAC, a dataset of Action-Level Mental model ANnotations for Agent Collaboration built from the Map Task, a classic dyadic routing task from social science. ALMANAC contains 2,987 collaboration actions, each paired with theory-informed mental model annotations that record the participants' self-reasoning, perceived partner intent, and perceived team goal. We benchmark six LLMs on predicting humans' next-turn behavior and mental models. Our results demonstrate ALMANAC's utility in evaluating models' ability to simulate human collaborative behaviors and infer their underlying mental models. The project page is available at https://human-agent-collab.hailab.io/almanac.
Yifan Zhang SalesForce.com, Chen Huang National University of Singapore, Yueke Zhang, Jiahao Zhang Vanderbilt University, Toby Jia-Jun Li University of Notre Dame, Collin McMillan University of Notre Dame, Kevin Leach Vanderbilt University, Yu Huang Vanderbilt University
Code Language Models (CodeLLMs) traditionally learn attention based solely on statistical input-output token correlations (“machine attention”). In contrast, human developers rely on intuition, selectively fixating on semantically salient tokens during program comprehension. We present EyeMulator, a model-agnostic technique to align CodeLLM attention with human visual attention without architectural changes. By extracting scan paths from eye-tracking data, we derive token-level attention weights used to augment the loss function during fine-tuning. This induces the model to mimic human focus. Our evaluation across StarCoder, Llama-3.2, and DeepSeek-Coder shows that EyeMulator significantly outperforms baselines, achieving gains of over 30 CodeBLEU points in translation and up to 22 BERTScore points in summarization. Ablation studies confirm that these gains stem directly from replicating human attention dynamics. Artifacts are available at https://zenodo.org/records/17205682.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Ziyi Wang, Yuxuan Lu, Wenbo Li, Amirali Amini Northeastern University and Sharif University of Technology, Bo Sun Northeastern University, Yakov Bart Northeastern University, Weimin Lyu Amazon, Jiri Gesi Amazon Science 等 16 位作者
Can Large Language models (LLMs) accurately simulate the next web action of a specific user? While LLMs have shown promising capabilities in generating believable human behaviors, evaluating their ability to mimic real user behaviors remains an open challenge, largely due to the lack of high-quality, publicly available datasets that capture both the observable actions and the internal reasoning of an actual human user. To address this gap, we introduce OPeRA, a novel dataset of Observation, Persona, Rationale, and Action collected from real human participants during online shopping sessions. OPeRA is the first public dataset that comprehensively captures: user personas, browser observations, fine-grained web actions, and self-reported just-in-time rationales. We developed both an online questionnaire and a custom browser plugin to gather this dataset with high fidelity. Using OPeRA, we establish the first benchmark to evaluate how well current LLMs can predict a specific user’s next action and rationale with a given persona and history. This dataset lays the groundwork for future research into LLM agents that aim to act as personalized digital twins for human.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Yuxuan Lu, Bingsheng Yao Northeastern University, Shao Zhang Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Yisi Sang Amazon, Yun Wang Microsoft Research, Hansu Gu Amazon, Peng Zhang, Tun Lu Fudan University 等 10 位作者
Deploying machine learning models in real-world domain-specific scenarios is challenged by the scarcity of expert annotations and by data drift, where the statistical properties of incoming data continuously evolve. Active Learning (AL) iteratively improves compact models with expert annotations but suffers from recurring cold-start degradation, while LLMs provide strong off-the-shelf performance yet cannot leverage newly accumulated labels, raising the question: how can we better leverage LLMs to assist the active learning process? Through an empirical study on five legal and biomedical datasets, we reveal a complementary temporal dynamic: LLMs excel during early and post-drift stages, while AL-assisted compact models eventually surpass them as annotations accumulate. Motivated by this finding, we propose an ensemble system that combines an LLM, an AL-assisted compact model, and an automatic switch module that routes predictions to the better-performing model in real time. Evaluated under simulated data drift on two mental health datasets, our system achieves 96–98% switch accuracy and consistently outperforms either model used alone.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop) · 2026 · 正式发表