Human-centered assessment tasks, which are essential for systematic decision-making, rely heavily on human judgment and typically lack verifiable ground truth. Existing approaches face a dilemma: methods using only human judgments suffer from heterogeneous expertise and inconsistent rating scales, while methods using only model-generated scores must learn from imperfect proxies or incomplete features.
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:2606. 13221v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating new large language models typically requires costly human annotation campaigns at scale.
By Bora Kargi, David Salinas
arXiv:2607. 16239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI judges offer a scalable, low-cost alternative to human evaluation, but their outputs can be biased relative to human preferences and highly item-dependent, varying across judges, tasks, and domains.
By Lei Shi, Anlan Zhang, Rita Lyu, Zhengmian Hu, Tong Yu, David Arbour, Avi Feller, Saayan Mitra, Ritwik Sinha
arXiv:2605. 02122v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Human evaluation remains the primary standard for assessing modern AI systems, yet annotator disagreement, bias, and variability make system rankings fragile under standard majority vote aggregation.
By Akash Bonagiri, Gerard Janno Anderias, Saee Patil, Angelina Lai, Devang Borkar, Gezheng Kang, Ishant Gandhi, Setareh Rafatirad, Houman Homayoun
arXiv:2601. 21817v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating large language models (LLMs) on open-ended tasks without ground-truth labels is increasingly done via the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm.
By Mingyuan Xu, Xinzi Tan, Jiawei Wu, Doudou Zhou
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
arXiv:2605. 15416v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Jung et al.
By Gaojie Jin, Yong Tao, Lijia Yu, Tianjin Huang
The paper introduces multi-expert Conformal Risk Control (CRC) algorithms for pairwise LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation in open-ended dialogue. Two initial methods—Score Averaging and Decision Voting—aggregate at the score and decision levels, respectively, and outperform single-expert approaches on homogeneous expert panels. To address limited coverage on heterogeneous panels, the authors propose Marginal‑Calibrated Conformal Consensus (MC3), which captures distinct per‑expert scoring scales through threshold ratios while maintaining a unified decision function, and demonstrate its effectiveness on a new 1,800‑pair human pairwise‑preference benchmark called Panel.
By Ming Cheng, Yusheng Dai, Qiuhong Ke, Zhaolin Chen, Lizhen Qu
The paper argues that traditional global calibration metrics, such as Expected Calibration Error and Brier Score, are confounded by differences in model accuracy when comparing large language models. It introduces ACE, an accuracy‑controlled evaluation framework that offers Instance‑Aligned, Distribution‑Aligned, and Candidate‑Aligned views to provide fairer cross‑model comparisons. Experiments across various benchmarks reveal that many reported calibration advantages disappear after accuracy control and that model rankings often reverse, indicating that raw global metrics are unreliable for cross‑model calibration assessment.
By Zhichao Yang, Caiqi Zhang, Ruihan Yang, Chengzu Li, Nigel Collier, Deqing Yang
Large Language Model judges are commonly used to rank texts via pairwise comparison, with reliability traditionally measured by position bias, transitivity, and pairwise agreement. This paper argues that these proxies are misleading because they are dominated by close‑rank‑gap pairs, which contribute little to the overall ranking, while far‑gap pairs carry the true ranking signal. Experiments on simulations and human‑rated corpora show weak correlation between the proxies and actual ranking accuracy, suggesting judges should be evaluated using rank‑gap‑conditional metrics against human rankings.
By Bruno Brocai, Maria Becker
arXiv:2606. 26429v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Current LLM evaluation relies on two complementary but often disconnected signals: static benchmarks with objective correctness labels and arena-style preference data that better reflect open-ended user interactions.
By Aaron J. Li, Hao Huang, Youngmin Park, Yitong Ma, Wei-Lin Chiang, Li Chen, Cho-Jui Hsieh, Bin Yu, Ion Stoica