We introduce SocialArena, a benchmark for systematically defining and evaluating the social intelligence of large language models (LLMs). Although LLMs are increasingly deployed in socially interactive applications such as mental health counseling, companionship chatbots, and educational tutoring, existing evaluations remain fragmented focusing on isolated capabilities or single scenarios and evaluation reliability is largely unverified. This work makes three main contributions to address these limitations. (1) We first propose a unified three-tier framework that defines social intelligence along three capability dimensions: role-playing ability, mental state reasoning, and behavioral reasoning. To operationalize this definition, we design a role-playing dialogue paradigm with explicit character thinking for evaluation, enabling simultaneous assessment of these capabilities in a manner that mirrors realistic human interactions. (2) To ensure diversity across social scenarios and thereby prevent evaluation conclusions from being confined to specific scenarios, we introduce the U-TRIMF framework, which guides us in synthesizing social contexts with broad coverage. (3) To obtain reliable evaluation, we invest $132.4K to recruit and train human annotators and adopt a human-annotated arena-style protocol, where annotators compare model responses and provide preference labels along with natural-language critiques. We hope that SocialArena can provide valuable insights and guidance for future LLM improvements.
Rubric-based reinforcement learning (RL) offers interpretable, fine-grained supervision for aligning large language models (LLMs) on open-ended generation tasks. However, static rubric criteria may become saturated or remain beyond the policy's exploration, rendering the reward signals insufficiently discriminative. While recent efforts seek to guide sampling exploration or evolve rubrics, they fail to explicitly factor in how rubric difficulty should track the evolving policy's capabilities, resulting in a persistent mismatch between the optimization objective and the policy's current capability frontier. In this paper, we propose \textbf{Co}-Evolving Policy and Rubric via \textbf{C}apability \textbf{A}wareness (\textbf{CoCA}), a closed-loop framework that jointly adapts the rubric and policy through criterion-level diagnosis. Specifically, CoCA contrasts query-only and rubric-guided rollouts to characterize each criterion relative to the current policy, recalibrates criteria with mismatched difficulty, and identifies guidance-revealed capability gaps for frontier-based learning. Based on this insight, CoCA either expands rubric-conditioned frontiers through guided optimization or transfers qualified gains through on-policy self-distillation. As the policy updates, CoCA improves the capability diagnosis and enables more reliable distillation, thereby completing the co-evolution loop. Extensive experiments across diverse benchmarks and LLMs demonstrate that CoCA consistently improves performance over rubric-based RL methods. Moreover, CoCA promotes the internalization of guidance-revealed capabilities into query-only behavior while mitigating capability degradation.
Chonghua Liao, Ke Wang Alibaba Group, Yuchuan Wu Alibaba Group, Ruoran Li, Fei Huang Alibaba Group US, Yongbin Li Alibaba Group
Role-playing agents (RPAs) require balancing multiple objectives, such as instruction following, persona consistency, and stylistic fidelity, which are not always perfectly aligned across different dimensions. While prior work has primarily relied on supervised fine-tuning or reinforcement learning with scalarized rewards, these approaches do not explicitly address the coordination of multiple reward dimensions during optimization. We present MOA (Multi-Objective Alignment), a reinforcement-learning framework that enables multi-dimensional, fine-grained rubric optimization for general RPAs. MOA introduces a novel multi-objective optimization strategy that trains simultaneously on multiple fine-grained rubrics to boost optimization performance. Besides, to address the issues of model output diversity and quality, we have also employed thought-augmented rollout with off-policy guidance. Experiments on PersonaGym and RoleMRC show that MOA consistently improves multi-dimensional role-playing performance over supervised and standard RL baselines. Under identical evaluation protocols, an 8B model trained with MOA reaches performance competitive with strong closed-source models across multiple evaluation dimensions. These results suggest that MOA provides a practical framework for training more capable general-purpose role-playing agents.
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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
Feiteng Fang, Dingwei Chen SUN YAT-SEN UNIVERSITY, Xiang Huang, Ting-En Lin, Yuchuan Wu Alibaba Group, Xiong Liu Alibaba Group, Jing Ye Institute of automation, Chinese academy of science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Ziqiang Liu 等 13 位作者
Currently, most reinforcement learning tasks focus on domains like mathematics and programming, where verification is relatively straightforward. However, in subjective tasks such as role-playing, alignment techniques struggle to make progress, primarily because subjective reward modeling using the Bradley-Terry model faces significant challenges when dealing with ambiguous preferences. To improve reward modeling in subjective tasks, this paper proposes AAM (Act-Adaptive Margin), which enhances reward modeling by dynamically calibrating preference margins using the model’s internal parameter knowledge. We design two versions of AAM that efficiently generate contextually-appropriate preference gaps without additional human annotation. This approach fundamentally improves how reward models handle subjective rewards by better integrating generative understanding with preference scoring. To validate AAM’s effectiveness in subjective reward modeling, we conduct evaluations on RewardBench, JudgeBench, and challenging role-playing tasks. Results show that AAM significantly improves subjective reward modeling performance, enhancing Bradley-Terry reward models by 2.95% in general tasks and 4.85% in subjective role-playing tasks. Furthermore, reward models trained with AAM can help downstream alignment tasks achieve better results. Our test results show that applying rewards generated by AAM-Augmented RM to preference learning techniques (e.g., GRPO) achieves state-of-the-art results on CharacterEval and Charm. The code and dataset will be released upon acceptance.
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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