arXiv AI

Prompt Lottery in LLM-as-a-Judge: Measuring and Mitigating Sensitivity to Syntactic Rephrasing

The paper introduces the "Prompt Lottery" phenomenon, where paraphrastic rephrasings of judge prompts in LLM-as-a-Judge (LLMaJ) lead to inconsistent judgments and can even reverse model rankings. A large-scale study across various tasks, judge families, and model backbones demonstrates that these prompt variations significantly alter evaluation outcomes. A user study shows that LLMaJ judges are 6–9 times more sensitive to prompt rephrasings than humans, and that aggregating multiple prompts improves robustness by focusing on consistent judgments.

arXiv AI
Sep 30

PADM\'E: Preference Alignment Data Synthesis for Meta-Evaluation of LM Agent Evaluators

PADM'E is a method for synthesizing preference‑aligned data to meta‑evaluate language‑model (LM) evaluators of agentic behaviors. It reframes meta‑evaluation as a preference judgment problem, generating criterion‑based data with small LMs and no human involvement. In a prototype, PADM'E produced 1,000 samples across four domains and three criteria, and human validation showed agreement with human judgment rising from 73% to 85% compared to a naive baseline.

By Cheng Chang, Yining Mao, Peng Qi
arXiv AI
Jun 26

Ask, Don't Judge: Binary Questions for Interpretable LLM Evaluation and Self-Improvement

arXiv:2606. 27226v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating LLM outputs remains a major bottleneck in NLP: human evaluation is expensive and slow, lexical metrics correlate poorly with human judgments on open-ended generation, and holistic LLM judges often produce opaque scores that are hard to debug.

By Sangwoo Cho, Kushal Chawla, Pengshan Cai, Zefang Liu, Chenyang Zhu, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Sambit Sahu
arXiv AI
Jul 10

Rethinking LLM-as-a-Judge: Representation-as-a-Judge with Small Language Models via Semantic Capacity Asymmetry

arXiv:2601. 22588v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are widely used as reference-free evaluators via prompting, but this "LLM-as-a-Judge" paradigm is costly, opaque, and sensitive to prompt design.

By Zhuochun Li, Yong Zhang, Ming Li, Yuelyu Ji, Yiming Zeng, Ning Cheng, Yun Zhu, Yanmeng Wang, Shaojun Wang, Jing Xiao, Daqing He
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 23

Prompting Strategy Effects Depend on the Judge: A Multilingual Study of LLM-as-a-Judge Robustness

The study investigates how different prompting strategies affect large language model (LLM) judges across multiple languages and tasks. Using a benchmark of 9 prompting strategies, 4 open-weight judges, 27 languages, and 4 tasks, the authors collected over 1 million pointwise scores validated against human judgments. Results show that prompting effectiveness is highly dependent on the judge model, can reverse direction across judges, and becomes less stable in low‑resource languages, indicating that prompt choice must be tailored to the specific evaluation setting.

By Asal Mehrabi, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Clemencia Siro
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 25

Ask, Don't Judge: Binary Questions for Interpretable LLM Evaluation and Self-Improvement

Evaluating LLM outputs remains a major bottleneck in NLP: human evaluation is expensive and slow, lexical metrics correlate poorly with human judgments on open-ended generation, and holistic LLM judges often produce opaque scores that are hard to debug. We propose BINEVAL, a framework that decomposes evaluation criteria into atomic binary questions and aggregates the resulting verdicts into interpretable, multi-dimensional scores.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

LLJ Cards: Best practices for the Use of LLMs as Judges

arXiv:2609.24516v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a popular alternative for evaluation. Often referred to as LLMs as judges (LLJs), these s...

By Khaoula Chehbouni, Melina Medjdoub, Florian Carichon, Golnoosh Farnadi, Jackie Chi Kit Cheung
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Evaluating the Evaluator: Summarization Metrics and LLM-Judges beyond English

The paper introduces BASSE, a multilingual meta‑evaluation dataset containing 2,040 human‑rated abstractive summaries produced manually or by five LLMs with four prompts. Annotators scored each summary on coherence, consistency, fluency, relevance, and 5W1H using a 5‑point Likert scale. Benchmarking shows proprietary LLM‑judge models best align with human judgments, followed by criteria‑specific automatic metrics, while open‑source judge LLMs perform poorly.

By Jeremy Barnes, Naiara Perez, Alba Bonet-Jover, Bego\~na Altuna
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Judging LLM-as-a-Judge: Concerning Rubric Artifacts in LLM-based Automated Text Generation Evaluation

The paper examines LLM-as-a-Judge systems used to assess AI-generated text, questioning the assumption that judgments are derived from reasoning over responses and rubrics. It finds that classifiers trained solely on rubric text can predict judge outputs, indicating that rubrics contain recoverable evaluative signals independent of the responses. Counterfactual experiments show judges often fail to adjust decisions when either the response or rubric criterion is reversed, raising doubts about the reliability of rubric-based LLM evaluation.

By Anshul Bagaria, Sowmya S Sundaram, Gokul S Krishnan, Balaraman Ravindran