The paper proposes a model-based evaluation framework that merges multidimensional item response theory (IRT) with question context embeddings to predict large language model (LLM) performance on unseen questions. By representing LLMs with latent capability profiles and incorporating question content to inform item characteristics, the approach improves prediction accuracy over model-free baselines in within-scenario settings and offers a richer description of capability variation than unidimensional models. However, the study also finds that this generalizability does not reliably extend to cross-scenario shifts, indicating a key limitation for broader application.
By Ergan Shang, Weijing Tang, Yinqiu He
arXiv:2608. 06609v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated item evaluation (AIE) refers to the use of computational methods to assess item quality without requiring manual expert review or field testing of the items under evaluation.
By Hotaka Maeda, Yikai Lu
arXiv:2608. 07208v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Existing measures of how much a text is about a concept read the surface of the text: dictionary word shares, topic proportions, embedding similarities.
By Luc Hazenoot, Zhaochun Ren, Amirhossein Zohrehvand
arXiv:2608. 05726v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are often used as evaluators of text quality, known as LLM-as-a-Judge, which can outperform conventional automatic evaluation metrics that rely on reference texts.
By Yuma Asato, Kiyoaki Shirai, Natthawut Kertkeidkachorn
Large Language Models (LLMs) are often used as evaluators of text quality, known as LLM-as-a-Judge, which can outperform conventional automatic evaluation metrics that rely on reference texts. However, LLM evaluators tend to generate particular scores regardless of the context of the evaluated text, which is known as scoring bias.
The article examines how AI‑assisted item generation is filtered by a computational evaluator before expert review, focusing on representation, structural screening, and candidate‑form dependence. Through two in‑silico studies of 32,000 Big Five items, the authors show that subtle differences in semantic representation and structural evaluation lead to divergent item selections, even when overall content coverage appears stable. The findings reveal that the evaluator, often treated as a neutral technical step, actually shapes the evidence and wording that psychometricians ultimately review, highlighting its role as a revisable component of measurement design.
By Christopher Brooks (School of Information, University of Michigan)
The paper introduces the concept of LLM‑specific utility, defining it as the performance gain a target large language model (LLM) achieves when provided with a passage compared to answering without evidence. A benchmark of utilitarian passages is built for four LLMs (Qwen3‑8B/14B/32B and Llama 3.1‑8B) across three QA datasets, revealing that each model benefits most from its own tailored evidence and that evidence optimized for other models is consistently suboptimal. The authors also create SpecUBench, a benchmark for LLM‑specific utility judgment, and show that current utility‑aware retrieval methods largely capture model‑agnostic usefulness, struggling to estimate LLM‑specific utility.
"whyItMatters":"The study demonstrates that retrieval‑augmented generation must consider model‑specific evidence selection to truly improve LLM performance, highlighting a gap in existing utility‑aware methods."
By Hengran Zhang, Keping Bi, Jiafeng Guo, Jiaming Zhang, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xueqi Cheng
arXiv:2606. 00467v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used for zero-shot annotation and LLM-as-a-judge tasks, yet their reliability hinges on how model-internalized priors interact with user-provided instructions.
By Etienne Casanova, Rafal Kocielnik, R. Michael Alvarez
arXiv:2601. 02580v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional methods for determining assessment item parameters, such as difficulty and discrimination, rely heavily on expensive field testing to collect student performance data for Item Response Theory (IRT) calibration.
By Christopher Ormerod
arXiv:2608. 05086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models differ in how safely they behave and these differences are measured by safety benchmarks.
By Joshua Fonseca Rivera (Independent), Neil Shah (Independent), David Demitri Africa (UK AI Security Institute), Konstantinos Voudouris (UK AI Security Institute)
arXiv:2511. 04689v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating large language models (LLMs) typically requires thousands of benchmark items, making the process expensive, slow, and increasingly impractical at scale.
By Peiyu Li, Xiuxiu Tang, Si Chen, Ying Cheng, Ronald Metoyer, Ting Hua, Nitesh V. Chawla
arXiv:2608. 10385v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as relevance assessors in information retrieval (IR) evaluation, raising questions about how assessor framing affects judgment reliability and downstream system comparison.
By Samaneh Mohtadi, Pietro Bernardelle, Joel Mackenzie, Gianluca Demartini