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OASST-ETC Dataset: Alignment Signals from Eye-tracking Analysis of LLM Responses

Computation and Language 2025-06-04 v3 Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

While Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced natural language processing, aligning them with human preferences remains an open challenge. Although current alignment methods rely primarily on explicit feedback, eye-tracking (ET) data offers insights into real-time cognitive processing during reading. In this paper, we present OASST-ETC, a novel eye-tracking corpus capturing reading patterns from 24 participants, while evaluating LLM-generated responses from the OASST1 dataset. Our analysis reveals distinct reading patterns between preferred and non-preferred responses, which we compare with synthetic eye-tracking data. Furthermore, we examine the correlation between human reading measures and attention patterns from various transformer-based models, discovering stronger correlations in preferred responses. This work introduces a unique resource for studying human cognitive processing in LLM evaluation and suggests promising directions for incorporating eye-tracking data into alignment methods. The dataset and analysis code are publicly available.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2503.10927,
  title  = {OASST-ETC Dataset: Alignment Signals from Eye-tracking Analysis of LLM Responses},
  author = {Angela Lopez-Cardona and Sebastian Idesis and Miguel Barreda-Ángeles and Sergi Abadal and Ioannis Arapakis},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2503.10927},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

This paper has been accepted to ACM ETRA 2025 and published on PACMHCI