The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) used as judges in absolute scoring tasks exhibit systematic biases that compromise reliability. It shows that a judge’s task accuracy strongly predicts both its judging accuracy and its directional bias, yet more capable examinee models consistently receive more lenient judgments. To mitigate these biases, the authors propose a calibrated weighted majority voting (WMV) ensemble that estimates judges’ error rates from inter-judge agreement patterns, achieving near-oracle performance without labeled data and improving both accuracy and fairness.
By Gemma Zhang, Prachi Badarayani, Asmi Kumar, Sadid Hasan, Sulaiman Vesal
arXiv:2605. 25240v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Two methodologies dominate current practices of benchmarking: rubric-based scoring evaluates items against predefined criteria, whereas comparative judgment elicits pairwise preferences between outputs.
By Russell Yang, Ruishi Chen, Pierce Kelaita, Riya Ranjan, Sibo Ma, Charles Dickens, Matthew Guillod, Megan Ma, Julian Nyarko
arXiv:2604. 22891v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-as-a-Judge has become a dominant approach in automated evaluation systems, playing critical roles in model alignment, leaderboard construction, quality control, and so on.
By Jinming Yang, Zheng Hu, Chuxian Qiu, Zhenyu Deng, Xinshan Jiao, Tao Zhou
The paper introduces JudgeBiasBench, a benchmark that systematically quantifies judgment biases in large language model (LLM)-based judges across four dimensions and 12 bias types. It evaluates both generative and discriminative judges, revealing significant bias patterns that undermine reliability. The authors propose bias-aware training—reinforcement learning for generative judges and contrastive learning for discriminative judges—to reduce these biases while maintaining evaluation performance.
By Hongli Zhou, Hui Huang, Rui Zhang, Kehai Chen, Bing Xu, Conghui Zhu, Tiejun Zhao, Muyun Yang
The paper investigates how the design of LLM-as-a-Judge protocols influences both the intrinsic quality of judgments and their downstream utility in open-ended tasks. By varying verdict granularity, critique usage, and evaluation batching, and by applying Judge guidance to test-time inference methods such as Best-of-N selection, revision, and beam search, the authors find that judgment quality and downstream performance do not always align and that protocol choices significantly affect outcomes. The study highlights the need for comprehensive evaluation of LLM Judges that considers both judgment quality and practical utility.
By Zheng Zhang, Lufei Li, Xinyue Tan, Yuanhao Zeng, Ziwei Shan, Yexin Li, Kan Ren
arXiv:2606.05122v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly evaluated by other models, raising a natural question: can a model predict how a judge will score its own ou...
By XiuYu Zhang, Yi Shan, Junfeng Fang, Zhenkai Liang
The paper introduces a lifecycle framework for LLM-as-a-Judge systems used to evaluate recommendation explanations at Netflix. It outlines four phases—Birth, Training, Deployment, and Monitoring—detailing how each stage addresses specific technical and operational challenges. The authors report that after five weeks of A/B testing, judge-aligned explanations increased novel content viewing and successful browse-to-play sessions without quality takedowns.
By Emma Yanyang Kong, JJ Tan, Ishan Gupta, Lars Olds, Claire Campbell, David Fagnan, Veli Balin, Rohan Gosain, Louis Garcia, Minsu Jang
arXiv:2604. 06996v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-as-a-judge has become the de facto approach for evaluating LLM outputs.
By Jos\'e Pombal, Ricardo Rei, Andr\'e F. T. Martins
Large language models are increasingly evaluated by other models, raising a natural question: can a model predict how a judge will score its own output? We find that the ability is largely present before any targeted training: prompted few-shot, a base model already predicts an external judge's multi-attribute quality scores on open-ended responses well above chance across three benchmarks.
JudgeSense is a benchmark comprising 880 items from human‑labelled corpora, each presented under two differently worded instructions that ask the same question. The study evaluates 25 judges from six providers across four tasks, measuring how rewording affects agreement with the judge’s own verdicts. Results show that rewording reduces agreement on all tasks, with significant effects on two, and that stability varies across tasks and is not predicted by parameter count.
By Rohith Reddy Bellibatlu, Edward Raff, Wenbin Zhang
arXiv:2606. 05384v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-as-judge evaluation is widely used in benchmarking pipelines, where model outputs are compared and ranked using automated evaluators.
By Srimonti Dutta, Akshata Kishore Moharir
The paper introduces SESSE, a training‑free framework that breaks down LLM‑as‑judge evaluations into five steps—Sketch, Expand, Sort, Summarize, Evaluate—by mining sub‑questions from the judge’s own error cases. It requires no oracle responses, task‑specific rubrics, or fine‑tuning, yet on RewardBench it matches the performance of chain‑of‑thought baselines and rivals a fine‑tuned specialist (RISE‑Judge‑32B). SESSE provides per‑criterion vote evidence, offering an interpretable audit trail that can diagnose label ambiguity and judge failure modes that a single holistic output token cannot reveal.
By Dae Lee, Mihai Delgeanu, Adel Youssef