arXiv AI

PRISM: Calibrating Black-Box Judges with Counterfactual Probes

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

Toward Robust LLM-Based Judges: Taxonomic Bias Evaluation and Debiasing Optimization

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
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 23

Prompting Strategy Effects Depend on the Judge: A Multilingual Study of LLM-as-a-Judge Robustness

The study investigates how different prompting strategies affect large language model (LLM) judges across multiple languages and tasks. Using a benchmark of 9 prompting strategies, 4 open-weight judges, 27 languages, and 4 tasks, the authors collected over 1 million pointwise scores validated against human judgments. Results show that prompting effectiveness is highly dependent on the judge model, can reverse direction across judges, and becomes less stable in low‑resource languages, indicating that prompt choice must be tailored to the specific evaluation setting.

By Asal Mehrabi, Mohammad Aliannejadi, Clemencia Siro
arXiv AI
2d ago

Prompt Lottery in LLM-as-a-Judge: Measuring and Mitigating Sensitivity to Syntactic Rephrasing

The paper introduces the "Prompt Lottery" phenomenon, where paraphrastic rephrasings of judge prompts in LLM-as-a-Judge (LLMaJ) lead to inconsistent judgments and can even reverse model rankings. A large-scale study across various tasks, judge families, and model backbones demonstrates that these prompt variations significantly alter evaluation outcomes. A user study shows that LLMaJ judges are 6–9 times more sensitive to prompt rephrasings than humans, and that aggregating multiple prompts improves robustness by focusing on consistent judgments.

By Ilija Subasic, Brett Levert, Andrew Rabinovich, Sajjad Pakdamansavoji, Zhao Chen
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Judging LLM-as-a-Judge: Concerning Rubric Artifacts in LLM-based Automated Text Generation Evaluation

The paper examines LLM-as-a-Judge systems used to assess AI-generated text, questioning the assumption that judgments are derived from reasoning over responses and rubrics. It finds that classifiers trained solely on rubric text can predict judge outputs, indicating that rubrics contain recoverable evaluative signals independent of the responses. Counterfactual experiments show judges often fail to adjust decisions when either the response or rubric criterion is reversed, raising doubts about the reliability of rubric-based LLM evaluation.

By Anshul Bagaria, Sowmya S Sundaram, Gokul S Krishnan, Balaraman Ravindran
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 5

Evaluating LLM-as-a-Judge Beyond Score Alignment: A Psychometric Analysis of Residual Judging Difficulty

The paper investigates how well large language models (LLMs) can serve as judges in summarization evaluation by applying psychometric techniques. Using Many‑Facet Rasch Models, the authors decompose human and LLM ratings into latent summary quality, rater severity, dimension severity, and rating‑scale thresholds, and introduce a residual hardness metric to capture judging difficulty. Their analysis of 17 open‑weight LLM judges on the SummEval dataset reveals that moderate alignment in latent quality does not translate to alignment in residual hardness; humans and LLMs differ in which summary–dimension units are hard, with LLMs tending to find consistency hard and humans tending to find coherence hard, and some hard cases can be predicted from observable source–summary properties.

By Longwei Cong, Sonja Hahn, Sebastian Gombert, Leon Camus, Fabian Zehner, Hendrik Drachsler, Ulf Kroehne