Gayane Ghazaryan

Author directory

2026

Reward models are central to LLM alignment, yet current benchmarks reveal little about how they represent diverse and sometimes competing social preferences. We extend reward-model evaluation to four socially consequential domains: bias, safety, morality, and ethical reasoning. Our analysis shows that strong benchmark performance can obscure important differences in social behavior. Models may avoid some stereotypes while reinforcing others, and aggregate bias scores can hide these opposing tendencies. We also find that stronger stereotype avoidance can come at the expense of contextual faithfulness, revealing a trade-off between social bias mitigation and sensitivity to context. Across a broad set of reward models, standard benchmark performance is only inconsistently related to socially aligned behavior. These results show that stronger reward models are not uniformly better at navigating pluralistic social expectations and motivate more direct evaluation of the social preferences encoded in reward models.

2025

Question Answering (QA) datasets have been instrumental in developing and evaluating Large Language Model (LLM) capabilities. However, such datasets are scarce for languages other than English due to the cost and difficulties of collection and manual annotation. This means that producing novel models and measuring the performance of multilingual LLMs in low-resource languages is challenging. To mitigate this, we propose SynDARin, a method for generating and validating QA datasets for low-resoucre languages. We utilize parallel content mining to obtain human-curated paragraphs between English and the target language. We use the English data as context to generate synthetic multiple-choice (MC) question-answer pairs, which are automatically translated and further validated for quality. Combining these with their designated non-English human-curated paragraphs form the final QA dataset. The method allows to maintain content quality, reduces the likelihood of factual errors, and circumvents the need for costly annotation. To test the method, we created a QA dataset with 1.2K samples for the Armenian language. The human evaluation shows that 98% of the generated English data maintains quality and diversity in the question types and topics, while the translation validation pipeline can filter out ~70% of data with poor quality. We use the dataset to benchmark state-of-the-art LLMs, showing their inability to achieve human accuracy with some model performances closer to random chance. This shows that the generated dataset is non-trivial and can be used to evaluate reasoning capabilities in low-resource language.