Beyond Correctness: Evaluating Subjective Writing Preferences Across
  Cultures
Authors: name: Shuangshuang Ying; name: Yunwen Li; name: Xingwei Qu; name: Xin Li; name: Sheng Jin; name: Minghao Liu; name: Zhoufutu Wen; name: Xeron Du; name: Tianyu Zheng; name: Yichi Zhang; name: Letian Ni; name: Yuyang Cheng; name: Qiguang Chen; name: Jingzhe Ding; name: Shengda Long; name: Wangchunshu Zhou; name: Jiazhan Feng; name: Wanjun Zhong; name: Libo Qin; name: Ge Zhang; name: Wenhao Huang; name: Wanxiang Che; name: Chenghua Lin
Published: 2025-10-16 12:23:13

Abstract: Current preference learning methods achieve high accuracy on standard
benchmarks but exhibit significant performance degradation when objective
quality signals are removed. We introduce WritingPreferenceBench, a dataset of
1,800 human-annotated preference pairs (1,200 English, 600 Chinese) across 8
creative writing genres, where responses are matched for objective correctness,
factual accuracy, and length. On this benchmark, sequence-based reward
models--the standard architecture for RLHF--achieve only 52.7% mean accuracy,
while zero-shot language model judges perform at 53.9%. In contrast, generative
reward models that produce explicit reasoning chains achieve 81.8% accuracy. We
observe high within-model variance across genres: individual models range from
18.2% to 81.8% accuracy across different writing categories, with standard
deviations averaging 10.1%. This variance persists regardless of model scale,
with 27B parameter models showing no consistent improvement over 8B variants.
Our results suggest that current RLHF methods primarily learn to detect
objective errors rather than capture subjective quality preferences (e.g.,
creativity, stylistic flair, and emotional resonance), and that successful
preference modeling may require intermediate reasoning representations rather
than direct classification.