The paper investigates whether accuracy and order sensitivity in large language model (LLM) multiple‑choice question (MCQ) evaluation move together. Using proprietary and open‑weight models on MMLU and ARC‑Challenge, the authors measure order sensitivity with flip rate and recall standard deviation (RStd) and find that these metrics often diverge from accuracy and from each other. They conclude that accuracy alone is insufficient and recommend reporting both flip rate and RStd alongside accuracy.
By Karl Hanna, Chen Feng
arXiv:2608. 11947v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multiple-choice benchmarks are widely used to evaluate large language models, but MCQ scores conflate knowledge with sensitivity to option order, which makes them unreliable measures of model knowledge.
By Karl Hanna, Chen Feng
The paper demonstrates that multiple‑choice visual question answering (MC‑VQA) benchmarks are unreliable because model performance is highly sensitive to semantically neutral prompt formatting choices—such as option ID sets, delimiters, and separators—despite protocols that mitigate option‑order effects. Across seven multimodal large language models and five datasets, the authors observed frequent rank reversals when systematically varying 48 equivalent prompt formats, attributing the instability to tokenizer‑induced token fusion or removal and to how option ID sets influence attention patterns. Consequently, MC‑VQA rankings correlate weakly with open‑ended evaluation, revealing that MC‑VQA reflects option‑selection dynamics as well as multimodal reasoning.
By Fabio Rosenthal, Sebastian Schmidt, Thorsten Graf, Thorsten Bagdonat, Stephan G\"unnemann, Leo Schwinn
arXiv:2602.02219v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large language models are widely employed as evaluators, a paradigm commonly referred to as LLM-as-a-judge. Prior research has predominantly examin...
By Yuzheng Xu, Tosho Hirasawa, Tadashi Kozuno, Yoshitaka Ushiku
arXiv:2609.15467v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Adding answer options can lower multiple-choice scores without improving assessment validity. Turkish MMLU Pro examines this distinction using 12,000...
By M. Ali Bayram
arXiv:2606. 13685v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLM-as-a-Judge is now widely used to rank model outputs, train reward models, and populate public leaderboards, but its run-to-run reliability remains under-characterized.
By Abel Yagubyan
arXiv:2606. 26079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard benchmarks for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) score each item on one canonical ordering and miss whether order-irrelevant shuffling changes the answer, a baseline reliability property called for by emerging AI evaluation guidelines.
By Akshay Paruchuri, Sanmi Koyejo, Ehsan Adeli
The paper introduces a pluralistic agreement index, Gamma, to quantify how often wrong runs of large language models (LLMs) agree with the majority consensus. By decomposing Gamma into a mechanical component and a preference‑unexplained residual, the authors show that on GPT‑4.1 the mechanical part explains most of the agreement on multiple‑choice benchmarks but only about half on open‑domain tasks, revealing a residual bias that can cause self‑consistency to backfire on hard questions. The study provides a quantitative framework for understanding when majority voting over LLM samples improves or harms accuracy, without proposing new voting methods.
By Lizhuo Zhang, Mengmeng Tang, Chenfeng Long, Xiaoyong Tang, Xiang Luo
arXiv:2608.23411v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: LLM value studies often merge questionnaire ratings, pairwise choices, and values inferred from generated text into one profile. That merge assumes tha...
By Andrei Chetvergov, Stepan Ukolov, Timofei Sivoraksha, Alexander Evseev, Danil Sazanakov, Mikhail Solovev, Sergey Bolovtsov
arXiv:2610.17641v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Bias scores in language-model evaluations often conflate what a model prefers with whether it answers at all. We identify this confound in \textsc{BBQ}...
By Weitong Li, Donglin Song, Junkai Lin, Xi Xuan
The paper argues that language models’ intransitive preferences arise from multiple internally consistent latent orderings rather than noise around a single ordering. By demonstrating that a single ordering cannot explain observed inconsistencies and introducing a noise‑augmented mixture Bradley‑Terry model, the authors show that mixtures of orderings better capture preference structure across several models and tasks. A case study on Moral Machine dilemmas further illustrates that models can share latent components even when aggregate preferences differ.
By Aviral Chawla, William H. W. Thompson, Jean-Gabriel Young
Standard benchmarks for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) score each item on one canonical ordering and miss whether order-irrelevant shuffling changes the answer, a baseline reliability property called for by emerging AI evaluation guidelines. We introduce Facet-Probe, a five-facet audit (option, evidence-chunk, document-rank, image-set, and mixed-modality ordering) of 18 frontier and open-weight MLLMs.