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:2608. 02455v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Human-centered assessment tasks, which are essential for systematic decision-making, rely heavily on human judgment and typically lack verifiable ground truth.
By Zejun Xie, Xintong Li, Guang Wang, Desheng Zhang
Human-centered assessment tasks, which are essential for systematic decision-making, rely heavily on human judgment and typically lack verifiable ground truth. Existing approaches face a dilemma: methods using only human judgments suffer from heterogeneous expertise and inconsistent rating scales, while methods using only model-generated scores must learn from imperfect proxies or incomplete features.
SCOPE is a framework that calibrates an acceptance threshold for large language models used as pairwise judges, ensuring that the error rate among non-abstained judgments does not exceed a user-specified level α. It introduces Bidirectional Preference Entropy (BPE) to provide a bias-neutral uncertainty signal by querying the judge in both response positions and converting the averaged preference probability into an entropy-based score. Across multiple pairwise judging benchmarks, BPE outperforms standard confidence proxies in calibration and discrimination, while SCOPE consistently meets the target risk bound (empirical FDR ≈0.097–0.099 at α=0.10) and retains substantial coverage, accepting up to 2.4× more judgments under the same risk constraint.
By Sher Badshah, Ali Emami, Hassan Sajjad
arXiv:2606. 13221v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating new large language models typically requires costly human annotation campaigns at scale.
By Bora Kargi, David Salinas
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:2607. 25136v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Research on preference optimization often varies the training objective while holding the data fixed.
By Zhengtao Yao, Runhao Li, Xupeng Chen, Jiayi Cheng, Chenqian Le, Michael Yue, Siheng Wang, Haoyan Xu, Yuqi Li, Chenhao Wei, Zhengdao Li, Rongchao Zhang, Guang Yang, Yidong Wang, Junhao Dong
arXiv:2608.29168v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: The LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm has emerged as a scalable alternative to human evaluation. However, single-model judges are limited by their inherent model...
By Yiyue Qian, Shinan Zhang, Huan Song, Hannah Marlowe
arXiv:2606. 03650v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Choosing or ranking language models for a specific application is hardest when no task-specific labeled data exists, and standard public benchmarks cannot be trusted, their items having likely leaked into pretraining, so scores reflect memorization rather than fitness.
By Alexander Apartsin, Yehudit Aperstein
The paper proposes treating an ensemble of language models as a jury rather than an electorate, where each model’s reliability is inferred from patterns of agreement and disagreement without using labels. Using Expectation Maximisation, the authors estimate each expert’s latent reliability and derive a log‑odds weighted linear scoring rule. On a 1560‑question benchmark, this label‑free approach matches the performance of label‑fitted weights and surpasses the best single model and other label‑free alternatives.
By Alessandro Rozza, Davide Mambelli, Steven Motta, Juri Taresch
arXiv:2608. 02617v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We evaluate whether clinician pairwise preferences provide a reliable signal of clinical safety in large language model (LLM) evaluation using expert feedback from MOOVE (Massive Open Online Validation and Evaluation), a clinician-led platform collecting blinded pairwise preferences alongside multi-criterion rubric ratings.
By Fay Elhassan, David Sasu, Alexandra Kulinkina, Lars Henning Klein, Mary-Anne Hartley
arXiv:2608.22432v1 Announce Type: cross
Abstract: Multilingual LLM judges produce different evaluator-backbone rankings depending on the prompt language: on an eight-language Agent-as-a-Judge benchma...
By Alhasan Mahmood, Samir Abdaljalil, Hasan Kurban