English

Crowd-SFT: Crowdsourcing for LLM Alignment

Human-Computer Interaction 2025-06-05 v1 Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing Machine Learning

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly rely on Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) to align model responses with human preferences. While RLHF employs a reinforcement learning approach with a separate reward model, SFT uses human-curated datasets for supervised learning. Both approaches traditionally depend on small, vetted groups of annotators, making them costly, prone to bias, and limited in scalability. We propose an open, crowd-sourced fine-tuning framework that addresses these limitations by enabling broader feedback collection for SFT without extensive annotator training. Our framework promotes incentive fairness via a point-based reward system correlated with Shapley values and guides model convergence through iterative model updates. Our multi-model selection framework demonstrates up to a 55% reduction in target distance over single-model selection, enabling subsequent experiments that validate our point-based reward mechanism's close alignment with Shapley values (a well-established method for attributing individual contributions) thereby supporting fair and scalable participation.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2506.04063,
  title  = {Crowd-SFT: Crowdsourcing for LLM Alignment},
  author = {Alex Sotiropoulos and Sulyab Thottungal Valapu and Linus Lei and Jared Coleman and Bhaskar Krishnamachari},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.04063},
  year   = {2025}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T02:59:16.162Z