Alignment Data Map for Efficient Preference Data Selection and Diagnosis

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Authors: Sang‐Hun Lee, Eunwon Kim, Hwaran Lee, Buru Chang
Cited by: 0

Abstract

Human preference data is essential for aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, but collecting such data is often costly and inefficient-motivating the need for efficient data selection methods that reduce annotation costs while preserving alignment effectiveness.To address this issue, we propose Alignment Data Map, a data analysis tool for identifying and selecting effective preference data.We first evaluate alignment scores of the preference data by LLM-as-a-judge, explicit reward model, and reference-based approaches.The Alignment Data Map considers both response quality and inter-response variability based on the alignment scores.From our experimental findings, training on only 33% of samples that exhibit high-quality and low-variability achieves comparable or superior alignment performance on MT-Bench, Evol-Instruct, and AlpacaEval, compared to training with the full dataset.In addition, Alignment Data Map detects potential label misannotations by analyzing correlations between annotated labels and alignment scores, improving annotation accuracy.The implementation is available at https://github. com/01choco/Alignment-Data-Map

Fields of Study & Subjects

Natural Language Processing Techniques Topic Modeling Machine Learning and Data Classification

Publication details

Journal / source
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Publisher
Association for Computational Linguistics
Pages
38225–38241
Publication date
1 January 2026
Language
EN