arXiv AI

Jagged Judges: Epistemic Stability Under Perturbation, Pressure, and Persistence

The paper introduces the Wiggle Framework, a unified stress test for assessing epistemic stability in large language model (LLM) judges. It evaluates judge robustness across three dimensions—Mechanical Consistency, Single-turn Conviction, and Multi-turn Persistence—using 9 frontier models on 14 judging tasks related to safety, toxicity, AI writing detection, and political-response evaluation. Results show significant instability, with verdict flips ranging from 25–71% under static pushback and 62–91% when challenged by an adversarial LLM, and highlight that successful pressure often misaligns with ground truth.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

A Judge Should Know What Changed:Construct Validity for LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation

The paper introduces a two‑dimensional construct validity framework for evaluating large language models (LLMs) as judges, defining invariance (S) and sensitivity (R) to construct‑preserving and construct‑changing edits. Experiments across seven judges and four domains reveal high invariance (average S = 0.945) but low sensitivity (average R = 0.319), with sensitivity varying by edit type. Audits of public label sets show that surface‑only predictors can reproduce a substantial portion of labels, underscoring that high agreement does not guarantee construct validity.

By Jianlin Chen, Wenhui Chen, Ziyao Lin, Chi Man Vong
arXiv AI
2d ago

trajectory-judge: What Outcome-Only LLM Judges Miss on Agent Trajectories

The paper "trajectory-judge: What Outcome-Only LLM Judges Miss on Agent Trajectories" examines the limitations of outcome-only evaluation for large language model agents. Using a deterministic tool‑using support‑desk environment with a scripted oracle policy and a fault injector, the authors compare five different judging approaches—programmatic rules, outcome‑only, step‑rubric at two model sizes, and a self‑consistency ensemble—on metrics such as detection, step localisation, fault typing, calibration, and cost across 400 trajectories. The study finds that outcome‑only judges miss many silent faults and generate false positives, while step‑rubric judges achieve higher recall with no false alarms but at greater cost, and that none of the judges read the final reply, allowing fabricated promises to evade detection. "whyItMatters":"The findings highlight that current production‑default outcome‑only evaluations can overlook critical failures in agent behavior, underscoring the need for more nuanced, step‑level judging methods to ensure reliable LLM agent performance."

By Hadi Mohammadi
arXiv AI
Aug 14

Reasoning Jury: Multi-Model Consensus for Evaluating Reasoning Traces

arXiv:2608. 12585v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Improving reasoning LLMs requires the ability to judge the quality of long reasoning traces for effective reasoning data curation, strong training signals during reinforcement learning, and an in-depth understanding of reasoning behaviors during model performance evaluation.

By Congchao Wang, Diwakar Singh, Qiaozi Gao, Spyros Matsoukas, Yang Liu, Mahdi Namazifar
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

How Reliable Is Your Jailbreak Judge? Calibration and Adversarial Robustness of Automated ASR Scoring

arXiv:2606. 25487v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Almost every paper on LLM jailbreaks and prompt injection reports an attack-success rate (ASR), and that number is assigned not by people but by an automated judge: either a safety classifier trained for the task, or a general chat model prompted to grade.

By Yang Gao (Veyon Solutions)