arXiv AI

Intelligence Is Not the Bottleneck: Validating an LLM First-Pass Manuscript Score Against Peer-Review Outcomes

arXiv:2606. 15887v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) systems are increasingly proposed to assist peer review, yet most evaluations judge the prose of machine-generated review text, not the validity of the numeric score a system assigns.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Rethinking Verbalized Confidence for LLM-as-a-Judge: A Compatibility Shift on Post-2025 Proprietary Models

The paper argues that verbalized confidence—once viewed as overconfident and coarse—has become the preferred soft‑scoring method for LLM‑as‑a‑Judge on top‑tier proprietary models released after 2025. Experiments on SummEval, AggreFact, and HelpSteer2 across up to 18 LLMs show that log‑probabilities are no longer the best signal, and that adding an overconfidence advisory and self‑debate further improves calibration and robustness. The authors note that these enhancements incur little accuracy loss on post‑2025 models but do affect pre‑2025 ones, highlighting a compatibility shift in how confidence should be measured.

By Yu-Chung Hsiao
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Anchoring Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge Systems: Prior Scores Compromise Evaluation Independence

The study investigates how prior scores influence large language model (LLM) judgments in the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm. By testing three prompt conditions—no metadata, revision framing, and anchored metadata containing prior scores—the authors find that prior scores systematically bias evaluations, shifting ratings toward those scores across 192,000 attempts. The bias also affects categorical decisions, blocking 48% of error corrections and flipping 10.18% of correct judgments, and is not mitigated by Chain-of-Thought or a warning, underscoring the need for careful context engineering.

By Ante Kapetanovic, Kemal Altwlkany, Andro Mercep, Tomislav Duricic, Emanuel Lacic
arXiv AI
Aug 11

How Can Rhetoric Reward-Hack AI Reviewers? Dissecting Rhetorical Sensitivity in AI-Based Peer Review

arXiv:2608. 08975v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As large language models increasingly participate in scientific evaluation, we investigate a potential form of reward hacking: how rhetorical choices shape AI-review judgments when reported scientific content is preserved and how these effects vary across evaluation conditions.

By Ming Li, Chenguang Wang, Xirui Li, Xinyue Zeng, Dianqi Li, Peng Shi, Dawei Zhou, Tianyi Zhou