# SpreadsheetArena: Decomposing Preference in LLM Generation of Spreadsheet Workbooks

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.10002 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.10002/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 33 of its 58 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Feb 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 33)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Proximal Policy Optimization Algorithms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1707.06347/) (2017)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Deep reinforcement learning from human preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03741/) (2017)
- [SWE-bench: Can Language Models Resolve Real-World GitHub Issues?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06770/) (2023)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [Qwen3 Embedding: Advancing Text Embedding and Reranking Through Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05176/) (2025)
- [Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04132/) (2024)
- [Spider: A Large-Scale Human-Labeled Dataset for Complex and Cross-Domain Semantic Parsing and Text-to-SQL Task](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1809.08887/) (2018)
- [Tulu 3: Pushing Frontiers in Open Language Model Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15124/) (2024)
- [Measuring Coding Challenge Competence With APPS](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.09938/) (2021)
- [Dolma: an Open Corpus of Three Trillion Tokens for Language Model Pretraining Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.00159/) (2024)
- [HealthBench: Evaluating Large Language Models Towards Improved Human Health](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.08775/) (2025)
- [TAT-QA: A Question Answering Benchmark on a Hybrid of Tabular and Textual Content in Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.07624/) (2021)
- [SWE-Bench Pro: Can AI Agents Solve Long-Horizon Software Engineering Tasks?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.16941/) (2025)
- [Spider 2.0: Evaluating Language Models on Real-World Enterprise Text-to-SQL Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.07763/) (2024)
- [PIXIU: A Large Language Model, Instruction Data and Evaluation Benchmark for Finance](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05443/) (2023)
- [WildBench: Benchmarking LLMs with Challenging Tasks from Real Users in the Wild](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.04770/) (2024)
- [FinBen: A Holistic Financial Benchmark for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.12659/) (2024)
- [TableLlama: Towards Open Large Generalist Models for Tables](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09206/) (2023)
- [SpreadsheetBench: Towards Challenging Real World Spreadsheet Manipulation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.14991/) (2024)
- [JSONSchemaBench: A Rigorous Benchmark of Structured Outputs for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.10868/) (2025)
- [SheetCopilot: Bringing Software Productivity to the Next Level through Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.19308/) (2023)
- [Explaining Length Bias in LLM-Based Preference Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01085/) (2024)
- [SpreadsheetCoder: Formula Prediction from Semi-structured Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15339/) (2021)
- [PRBench: Large-Scale Expert Rubrics for Evaluating High-Stakes Professional Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.11562/) (2025)
- [The Common Pile v0.1: An 8TB Dataset of Public Domain and Openly Licensed Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.05209/) (2025)
- [Common Corpus: The Largest Collection of Ethical Data for LLM Pre-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01732/) (2025)
- [Remote Labor Index: Measuring AI Automation of Remote Work](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26787/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [BlueFin: Benchmarking LLM Agents on Financial Spreadsheets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30907/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We consider the task of end-to-end spreadsheet generation, where language models produce spreadsheet artifacts to satisfy users' explicit and implicit constraints, specified in natural language. We introduce SpreadsheetArena, a platform for evaluating models' performance on the task via blind pairwise preference votes of LLM-generated spreadsheet workbooks. As with other complex, open-ended tasks, relevant evaluation criteria can vary greatly across use cases, often in ways that are difficult to formalize. Compared to general dialogue or text generation settings, spreadsheet generation presents unique challenges and opportunities: the task output structure is well-defined and multi-dimensional, and there are often complex interactivity and layout considerations. We observe that stylistic, structural, and functional features of preferred spreadsheets vary meaningfully across prompts. Expert evaluations of spreadsheets for finance prompts suggest that even highly ranked models do not reliably produce spreadsheets aligned with domain-specific best practices. We host a live arena and release a dataset of prompts, generated spreadsheets, and preference votes, which we hope will facilitate further study of tasks operating over spreadsheets as a challenging and interesting class of complex, open-ended tasks for LLMs.