arXiv Machine Learning

How Many Humans Are 32 LLM Judges Worth?

The paper investigates how many human annotators are equivalent to a panel of 32 large‑language‑model (LLM) judges. By comparing the panel’s label distributions to empirical human labels on three ChaosNLI tasks, the authors find two distinct effective panel sizes: distribution‑error matching yields effective sizes of 2.304, 3.750, and 3.445, while spectral matching gives 4.242, 6.459, and 6.499, indicating a 1.72–1.89× gap. The study also explores how spectral diversity, participation ratio, and panel composition affect effective size, and demonstrates that carefully chosen panels can outperform baseline accuracy while improving effective size.

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

How Many Humans Is a Judge Panel Worth?

arXiv:2609.21277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How many human judgments does a panel of language models represent? The answer depends on what is matched. We audit categorical judge panels against...

By Chao Li, Yingying Yu, Yunfeng Li
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Ask Which, Not How Good: Sizing Benchmarks Scored by an LLM

The study analyzes 373,019 judgments from LLM‑scored benchmarks, decomposing variance into system, item, judge, and interaction components via generalizability theory. It finds that with a single judge, generalizability converges to a ceiling determined by the system‑by‑judge variance, which is substantially lower in pairwise preference settings, allowing one judge to suffice. The research also reveals significant biases in presentation order and highlights that many published win‑rate claims fall below the measured floor of the benchmarks.

By Atul Anand
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 14

The Geometry of Saturation: Effective Rank Predicts When Labels Stop Helping in Few-Shot Classification

arXiv:2606. 24903v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Few-shot label acquisition lacks a label-free signal for when additional labels cease to improve accuracy: existing stopping criteria either require a held-out validation set (violating the few-shot premise) or rely on theoretically ungrounded heuristics, so we introduce the spectral saturation index $S(K)=\mathrm{erank}(\hat{\Sigma}_W^{(K)})/K$, the exponential spectral entropy of the pooled within-class covariance normalized by per-class support size $K$, which measures the exploration rate per label and falls below a fixed threshold $\tau=0.

By Arnav Gupta
arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Frozen Judges, Moving Agents: Version-Dependent LLM-Judge Error and the Limits of Judge-Assisted Agent Evaluation

The paper investigates how language‑model judges can make version‑dependent errors when evaluating upgraded agents. Using 35 public coding‑agent submissions, two customer‑service agents, and over a thousand expert‑labeled trajectories, the authors show that fixed judges often reject task‑conditioned error invariance and can incorrectly approve failed patches, especially as agent capability increases. Paired audits of current outputs reduce interval width only marginally, and the study concludes that independent human patch review is still necessary.

By Jiapeng Li
arXiv Machine Learning
6d ago

Three Ways Classical Test Theory Misleads for LLM Judges

The article examines how classical test theory reliability statistics misrepresent the performance of large language model (LLM) judges. It shows that internal‑consistency coefficients, the dependability index, and Livingston‑Lewis accuracy each conflate judge error with item design or criterion validity, making it impossible to attribute a single reliability value to the judge alone. The authors argue that such misattribution can influence deployment decisions and documentation.

By Louis Yiven Zhu
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