The paper introduces SESSE, a training‑free framework that breaks down LLM‑as‑judge evaluations into five steps—Sketch, Expand, Sort, Summarize, Evaluate—by mining sub‑questions from the judge’s own error cases. It requires no oracle responses, task‑specific rubrics, or fine‑tuning, yet on RewardBench it matches the performance of chain‑of‑thought baselines and rivals a fine‑tuned specialist (RISE‑Judge‑32B). SESSE provides per‑criterion vote evidence, offering an interpretable audit trail that can diagnose label ambiguity and judge failure modes that a single holistic output token cannot reveal.
By Dae Lee, Mihai Delgeanu, Adel Youssef
arXiv:2606.05122v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly evaluated by other models, raising a natural question: can a model predict how a judge will score its own ou...
By XiuYu Zhang, Yi Shan, Junfeng Fang, Zhenkai Liang
Large language models are increasingly evaluated by other models, raising a natural question: can a model predict how a judge will score its own output? We find that the ability is largely present before any targeted training: prompted few-shot, a base model already predicts an external judge's multi-attribute quality scores on open-ended responses well above chance across three benchmarks.
arXiv:2608.30005v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Rubric-based reinforcement learning extends RL beyond tasks with exact answers or rule-based verifiers by scoring responses against instance-specific c...
By Fengyu Xie, Yilun Zhao, Bingsen Chen, Arman Cohan, Chen Zhao
The paper introduces JudgeBiasBench, a benchmark that systematically quantifies judgment biases in large language model (LLM)-based judges across four dimensions and 12 bias types. It evaluates both generative and discriminative judges, revealing significant bias patterns that undermine reliability. The authors propose bias-aware training—reinforcement learning for generative judges and contrastive learning for discriminative judges—to reduce these biases while maintaining evaluation performance.
By Hongli Zhou, Hui Huang, Rui Zhang, Kehai Chen, Bing Xu, Conghui Zhu, Tiejun Zhao, Muyun Yang
LLM-as-judge is essential for evaluating open-ended text and steering post-training, yet improving the judge itself typically relies on expensive annotations, reward models, or distillation from stron...
arXiv:2607. 22561v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-as-a-judge has become the standard for automated evaluation, but it suffers from high cost, significant latency, and opaque decisions -- limitations that undermine its scalability and reliability.
By Tzu-Heng Huang, Shengqi Qiu, Frederic Sala
JudgeProfile is a framework that analyzes the subjectivity of large language model (LLM) judges by separating evaluation into perception—how judges compare responses on attributes such as clarity, correctness, and detail—and prioritization—how much each attribute influences the final decision. Using the curated SubjectiveSet dataset of 50,013 response pairs evaluated by 21 judges across 87 attributes, the study finds that judges often agree on attribute judgments even when their overall choices differ. By estimating and adjusting attribute weights, the authors improve agreement with reference labels from 66.48% to 71.97%, outperforming fine‑tuning and rubric prompting.
By Qi Cao, Kangning Liu, Xuan Kan, Shunwen Tan, Yang Pei, Dake Chen, Yatai Ji, Zixuan Ye, Yuanpeng Tu, Daniel Li, Junbiao Tang, Pengtao Xie, Zihao He
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
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:2605. 25240v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Two methodologies dominate current practices of benchmarking: rubric-based scoring evaluates items against predefined criteria, whereas comparative judgment elicits pairwise preferences between outputs.
By Russell Yang, Ruishi Chen, Pierce Kelaita, Riya Ranjan, Sibo Ma, Charles Dickens, Matthew Guillod, Megan Ma, Julian Nyarko
The paper introduces a risk‑controlled framework for using large language models (LLMs) as judges in tasks without reference answers. By calibrating uncertainty thresholds on a held‑out set, the method ensures that the false discovery rate of accepted verdicts stays below a user‑specified level α with high probability, using finite‑sample Clopper–Pearson intervals. When the parametric judge lacks confidence, the instance is routed to a retrieval‑augmented mode with a second calibrated threshold, preserving the error guarantee while achieving higher coverage than single‑mode baselines.