arXiv AI

Does Every Instance Count Equally? Order Effects in LLM Multi-Instance Processing

The paper investigates how the order of independent inputs affects large language models’ ability to aggregate predictions. By testing fifteen LLMs on five datasets with seven different instance orderings, the authors find that accuracy can vary by up to 90 percentage points, with models performing best when majority-label instances appear first. Analysis of reasoning traces and attribution scores shows that models disproportionately focus on early instances, indicating uneven positional emphasis.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

Are LLMs Positionally Consistent Ordinal Classifiers? A Systematic Evaluation

Large language models (LLMs) used for ordinal classification exhibit positional bias, where changes in label order, demonstration order, and demonstration placement affect predictions. Systematic experiments across ten frontier LLMs, eight prompt/task/model factors, and five datasets reveal that all models are sensitive to these positional sources, and that accuracy and stability often diverge. Various correction methods, including pointwise, pairwise, and listwise inference, do not reliably mitigate the bias, though a comparison-based listwise approach shows the best overall balance yet varies across models and bias types.

By Yu Wang, Zhe Zhou, Menglin Liu, Ge Shi
arXiv AI
Aug 20

The Lifecycle of LLM-as-a-Judge for Large-Scale Recommendation Explanations

The paper introduces a lifecycle framework for LLM-as-a-Judge systems used to evaluate recommendation explanations at Netflix. It outlines four phases—Birth, Training, Deployment, and Monitoring—detailing how each stage addresses specific technical and operational challenges. The authors report that after five weeks of A/B testing, judge-aligned explanations increased novel content viewing and successful browse-to-play sessions without quality takedowns.

By Emma Yanyang Kong, JJ Tan, Ishan Gupta, Lars Olds, Claire Campbell, David Fagnan, Veli Balin, Rohan Gosain, Louis Garcia, Minsu Jang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 25

Same Evidence, Different Answer: Auditing Order Sensitivity in Multimodal Large Language Models

arXiv:2606. 26079v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Standard benchmarks for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) score each item on one canonical ordering and miss whether order-irrelevant shuffling changes the answer, a baseline reliability property called for by emerging AI evaluation guidelines.

By Akshay Paruchuri, Sanmi Koyejo, Ehsan Adeli