arXiv Machine Learning

Dropping Just a Handful of Preferences Can Change Top Large Language Model Rankings

arXiv:2508. 11847v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: We propose a method for evaluating the robustness of widely used LLM ranking systems -- variants of a Bradley--Terry model -- to dropping a worst-case very small fraction of preference data.

arXiv AI
6d ago

DIAL: Position-Debiased LLM Judges with Adaptive Human Preference Calibration

The paper introduces DIAL, a framework that uses large language models (LLMs) as judges while mitigating position bias and aligning their judgments with human preferences. DIAL separates judge‑specific position effects, learns shared structure in debiased LLM preferences, and adaptively calibrates this structure toward human targets using limited human comparisons. Experiments on simulations and three human‑preference benchmarks show that DIAL remains robust to unbalanced response order, achieves strong human‑aligned rankings with few labels, and adapts when LLM information is imperfect, supported by a real‑data study of over 410K judgments from 21 LLM judges.

By Zesheng Cai, Yingqi Fan, Sichang Chen, Jin-Hong Du
arXiv AI
Sep 1

When LLMs Benchmark Themselves: Deconstructing Self-Bias in Automated Evaluation

The paper investigates the issue of self‑bias when large language models (LLMs) generate and evaluate their own benchmarks. Using machine translation as a testbed, it shows that LLMs as both test‑set creators and evaluators produce model‑specific, homogeneous outputs that inflate their own scores, even when diversity controls are applied. The bias is strong enough that each model ranks itself first, overriding peer consensus, and the phenomenon also appears in open‑ended generation tasks.

By Wenda Xu, Sweta Agrawal, Vil\'em Zouhar, Markus Freitag, Daniel Deutsch