The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to their increasing utilization in Chinese K-12 education. Despite the growing integration of LLMs and education, the absence of a dedicated benchmark for evaluating LLMs within this domain presents a pressing concern. Consequently, there is an urgent need for a comprehensive natural language processing benchmark to precisely assess the capabilities of various LLMs in Chinese K-12 education. In response, we introduce E-EVAL, the first comprehensive evaluation benchmark specifically tailored for Chinese K-12 education. E-EVAL comprises 4,351 multiple-choice questions spanning primary, middle, and high school levels, covering a diverse array of subjects. Through meticulous evaluation, we find that Chinese-dominant models often outperform English-dominant ones, with many exceeding GPT 4.0. However, most struggle with complex subjects like mathematics. Additionally, our analysis indicates that most Chinese-dominant LLMs do not achieve higher scores at the primary school level compared to the middle school level, highlighting the nuanced relationship between proficiency in higher-order and lower-order knowledge domains. Furthermore, experimental results highlight the effectiveness of the Chain of Thought (CoT) technique in scientific subjects and Few-shot prompting in liberal arts. Through E-EVAL, we aim to conduct a rigorous analysis delineating the strengths and limitations of LLMs in educational applications, thereby contributing significantly to the advancement of Chinese K-12 education and LLMs.

Reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is a crucial technique in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human preferences, ensuring these LLMs behave in beneficial and comprehensible ways to users. However, a longstanding challenge in human alignment techniques based on reinforcement learning lies in their inherent complexity and difficulty in training. To address this challenge, we present a simple yet effective Contrastive Learning Framework for Human Alignment (CLHA) to align LLMs with human preferences directly. CLHA employs a novel rescoring strategy to evaluate the noise within the data by considering its inherent quality and dynamically adjusting the training process. Simultaneously, CLHA utilizes pairwise contrastive loss and adaptive supervised fine-tuning loss to adaptively modify the likelihood of generating responses, ensuring enhanced alignment with human preferences. Using advanced methods, CLHA surpasses other algorithms, showcasing superior performance in terms of reward model scores, automatic evaluations, and human assessments on the widely used “Helpful and Harmless” dataset.