# IDEAlign: Comparing Ideas of Large Language Models to Domain Expert

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02855 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.02855/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 66 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 2 Sep 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [SimCSE: Simple Contrastive Learning of Sentence Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08821/) (2021)
- [MiniLM: Deep Self-Attention Distillation for Task-Agnostic Compression of Pre-Trained Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.10957/) (2020)
- [Text Embeddings by Weakly-Supervised Contrastive Pre-training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03533/) (2022)
- [MPNet: Masked and Permuted Pre-training for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.09297/) (2020)
- [BERTopic: Neural topic modeling with a class-based TF-IDF procedure](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.05794/) (2022)
- [Whose Opinions Do Language Models Reflect?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17548/) (2023)
- [Towards General Text Embeddings with Multi-stage Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03281/) (2023)
- [SummEval: Re-evaluating Summarization Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.12626/) (2020)
- [Large Language Models Can Self-Improve](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11610/) (2022)
- [Smarter, Better, Faster, Longer: A Modern Bidirectional Encoder for Fast, Memory Efficient, and Long Context Finetuning and Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13663/) (2024)
- [MAUVE: Measuring the Gap Between Neural Text and Human Text using Divergence Frontiers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.01454/) (2021)
- [Large Dual Encoders Are Generalizable Retrievers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07899/) (2021)
- [MoverScore: Text Generation Evaluating with Contextualized Embeddings and Earth Mover Distance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.02622/) (2019)
- [All-but-the-Top: Simple and Effective Postprocessing for Word Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1702.01417/) (2017)
- [Large Language Models for Data Annotation and Synthesis: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13446/) (2024)
- [Reframing Human-AI Collaboration for Generating Free-Text Explanations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.08674/) (2021)
- [Revisiting Relation Extraction in the era of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.05003/) (2023)
- [Systematic Evaluation of LLM-as-a-Judge in LLM Alignment Tasks: Explainable Metrics and Diverse Prompt Templates](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.13006/) (2024)
- [Better Summarization Evaluation with Word Embeddings for ROUGE](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1508.06034/) (2015)
- [Contrasting Linguistic Patterns in Human and LLM-Generated News Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09067/) (2023)
- [Can You Trust LLM Judgments? Reliability of LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.12509/) (2024)
- [Bridging the Novice-Expert Gap via Models of Decision-Making: A Case Study on Remediating Math Mistakes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10648/) (2023)
- [Style Outweighs Substance: Failure Modes of LLM Judges in Alignment Benchmarking](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.15268/) (2024)
- [Beware of Words: Evaluating the Lexical Diversity of Conversational LLMs using ChatGPT as Case Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.15518/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to produce open-ended, interpretive annotations, yet there is no validated, scalable measure of idea-level similarity to expert annotations. We (i) introduce the content evaluation of LLM annotations as a core, understudied task, (ii) propose IDEAlign for capturing expert similarity judgments via pick-the-odd-one-out tasks, and (iii) benchmark various similarity methods (text embeddings, topic models, and LLM-as-a-judge) against these human ratings. Applying this approach to two real-world educational datasets (e.g., interpreting math reasoning and feedback generation), we find that most metrics fail to capture the nuanced dimensions of similarity meaningful to experts. LLM-as-a-judge performs best (11~18% improvement over other methods) but still falls short of expert alignment, making it useful as a triage tool rather than a substitute for human review. Our work demonstrates the difficulty of evaluating open-ended LLM annotations at scale, and positions IDEAlign as a reusable protocol for benchmarking on this task to help guide responsible deployment of LLMs.