arXiv Machine Learning

Equal Ranking Quality, Different Decisions: Training Order-Consistent LLM Scorers

The paper investigates how the order of candidate documents in a prompt affects the decisions made by large‑language‑model (LLM) scorers, even when their ranking quality is similar. It shows that five scorers with only a 0.010 nDCG@10 difference can produce retained‑set overlaps as low as 0.66–0.84, and that existing rerankers still exhibit significant order dependence. The authors propose Order‑Consistency SFT (OC‑SFT), a training method that reduces this dependence, maintaining ranking quality while improving decision stability across multiple tasks.

arXiv AI
Aug 20

Decomposing Wrong-Consensus Agreement in LLM Self-Consistency: A GPT-4.1 Case Study

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 Machine Learning
Aug 13

LODESTAR: Trustworthy Entropy Is Navigated, Not Merely Measured -- Reinforced Polarizer Keeps a Frozen LLM from Being Confidently Misled by the Wrong Evidence

arXiv:2608. 11922v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Predictive-distribution entropy makes a strong selection rule in retrieval-augmented question answering: across five QA benchmarks, keeping the candidate answer that a frozen respondent LLM produces with the lowest answer-token entropy lifts mean answer $F_1$ from 0.

By Po-Jen Ko, Che-Cheng Wu, Hung-Chun Hsu, Li-Yang Chang, Chuan-Ju Wang
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Pairwise Ranking Outperforms Single-Action RL for Offline Explanation Selection: A Practical Lesson

The paper presents a cost‑effective approach for industrial explainable‑recommendation systems by decoupling explanation generation from selection. Candidate explanations are pre‑generated using six prompt styles and two commodity LLMs, then a lightweight CPU‑resident selector (e.g., LambdaRank) chooses the best one at request time, achieving sub‑100 ms latency without GPUs. Experiments on a 2,958‑pair Google Local subset and a 300‑pair MovieLens‑1M split show that pairwise ranking methods outperform single‑action RL baselines, while KG‑path selectors achieve near‑perfect user satisfaction scores.

By Tanay Chowdhury, Saeideh Shahrokh Esfahani
arXiv AI
Jun 4

Knowledge Index of Noah's Ark

arXiv:2606. 05104v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Knowledge benchmarks for LLMs face three issues: scaling-driven designs that do not operationalize disciplinary representativeness; flat-payment annotation that permits lazy consensus; and unaudited ranking instability under bounded test budgets.

By Sheng Jin, Minghao Liu, Yunze Xiao, Zeqi Zhou, Heli Qi, Yifan Yao, Meishu Song, Kaijing Ma, Xuan Zhang, Sicong Jiang, Yizhe Li, Ningshan Ma, Jie Wei, Ziniu Li, Minglai Yang, Bangya Liu, Yiming Liang, Xiao Fang, Qingcheng Zeng, Jiarui Liu, Rui Yang, Shen Yan, Wenhao Huang, Jiaheng Liu, Zihan Wang, Weihao Xuan, Ge Zhang
arXiv AI
Jun 3

CoEval: Ranking Language Models for Custom Tasks Without Labeled Data or Trustworthy Benchmarks

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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 19

Pairwise Ranking Outperforms Single-Action RL for Offline Explanation Selection: A Practical Lesson

The paper presents a cost‑effective approach for industrial explainable‑recommendation systems by decoupling explanation generation from selection. Explanations are pre‑generated using six prompt styles and two commodity LLMs, then a lightweight CPU‑resident selector (e.g., LambdaRank) chooses the best one at request time, achieving sub‑100 ms latency without GPUs. Experiments on a 2,958‑pair Google Local subset and a 300‑pair MovieLens‑1M split show that pairwise ranking outperforms single‑action RL methods, while KG‑path selectors achieve near‑perfect unique‑output rates, and the overall end‑to‑end build cost is around $15 on commodity hardware.