Reflections and New Directions for Human-Centered Large Language Models
Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly shaping the private and professional lives of users, with numerous applications in business, education, finance, healthcare, law, and science. With this rise in global influence comes greater urgency to build, evaluate, and deploy these systems in a manner that prioritizes not only technical capabilities but also human priorities. This work presents a framework for developing Human-Centered Large Language Models (HCLLMs), which integrates perspectives from Natural Language Processing (NLP), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and responsible AI. Considering the ethics, economics, and technical objectives of language modeling, we argue that model developers need to address human concerns, preferences, values, and goals, not only during a cursory post-training stage, but rather with rigor and care at every stage of the pipeline. This paper offers human-centered insights and recommendations for developers at each stage, from system design to data sourcing, model training, evaluation, and responsible deployment. Then we conclude with a case study, applying these insights to understand the future of work with HCLLMs.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.06901,
title = {Reflections and New Directions for Human-Centered Large Language Models},
author = {Caleb Ziems and Dora Zhao and Rose E. Wang and Matthew Jörke and Ahmad Rushdi and Advit Deepak and Sunny Yu and Anshika Agarwal and Harshvardhan Agarwal and Gabriela Aranguiz-Dias and Aditri Bhagirath and Justine Breuch and Huanxing Chen and Ruishi Chen and Sarah Chen and Haocheng Fan and William Fang and Cat Gonzales Fergesen and Daniel Frees and Tian Gao and Ziqing Huang and Vishal Jain and Yucheng Jiang and Kirill Kalinin and Su Doga Karaca and Arpandeep Khatua and Teland La and Isabelle Levent and Miranda Li and Xinling Li and Yongce Li and Angela Liu and Minsik Oh and Nathan J. Paek and Anthony Qin and Emily Redmond and Michael J. Ryan and Aadesh Salecha and Xiaoxian Shen and Pranava Singhal and Shashanka Subrahmanya and Mei Tan and Irawadee Thawornbut and Michelle Vinocour and Xiaoyue Wang and Zheng Wang and Henry Jin Weng and Pawan Wirawarn and Shirley Wu and Sophie Wu and Yichen Xie and Patrick Ye and Sean Zhang and Yutong Zhang and Cathy Zhou and Yiling Zhao and James Landay and Diyi Yang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.06901},
year = {2026}
}