{"paper":{"title":"Pairwise Reference Alignment as a Model-Level Ordinal Observable","license":"http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["cs.LG"],"primary_cat":"cs.CL","authors_text":"Mujing Li","submitted_at":"2026-05-29T02:41:18Z","abstract_excerpt":"Pairwise preference data is widely used in language-model evaluation and alignment, often for model ranking, reward modeling, or preference optimization. This note formulates a more basic measurement question: given a reference distribution of pairwise preferences, what model-level quantity is estimated when we test whether a model ranks preferred responses above rejected responses?\n  We define pairwise reference alignment as an ordinal observable induced by a model scoring function. Given a reference pair distribution $P_{\\mathrm{pair}}$ over triples $(x,y^+,y^-)$, and a scalar model score $S"},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2605.30758","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2605.30758/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}