arXiv:2609. 18960v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Quality-aware synthetic-data selection rests on a proxy: examples that an LLM judge rates as good should also help a downstream model learn.
arXiv:2606. 23915v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Practice often treats automatic metrics for attribution in LLM retrieval-augmented generation as interchangeable.
arXiv:2607. 05904v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training a language model against its own reference-free judgments (the premise of self-rewarding, self-play, and LLM-as-a-judge pipelines) assumes a model's verdict on a shown answer tracks correctness.
The paper compares a non‑generative verifier (Jev) with a frontier LLM (Astra) on 495 human‑labelled claims from LLM‑AggreFact. Both models achieve statistically indistinguishable accuracy, yet Jev is 187‑fold cheaper and admits more unsupported claims. A confidence‑gated cascade that escalates uncertain claims improves cost‑efficiency, though the benefit comes mainly from the escalation share rather than the probability estimates.
The paper investigates how verifier components used in post‑training and test‑time loops can collapse when they are refreshed based on aggregate success scores. It shows that as a policy improves on one conjunctive target, the verifier’s on‑policy AUC can shift to favor a worse component, leading to a preference for a full‑outcome predictor over the intended component oracle. The authors provide theoretical thresholds, empirical demonstrations on text control and ECG data, and propose a repair that audits the component on its own failures to prevent damage.
arXiv:2607. 02104v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as cheap, scalable judges that compare candidate outputs pairwise.
arXiv:2608. 13564v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating language-model agents at scale increasingly relies on a second language model as an automatic judge, because the gold signal, an executable environment reward, is expensive, slow, or unavailable at deployment time.
The paper introduces a reference‑based bias detection method that audits hidden‑state representations of language models by encoding sentences as similarities to a fixed set of anchor sentences. This relative representation allows comparison across model variants, such as before and after fine‑tuning, and yields a metric called Representational Bias Shift (ΔB). ΔB correlates strongly with output‑level bias changes, can detect bias‑increasing checkpoints with high ROC AUC, and is computationally efficient, requiring only a few minutes and far less compute than traditional benchmarks.
The paper introduces DISCERN, a two-tier protocol for certifying that updates to production models do not increase risk. It first uses unlabeled data to detect benign updates based on disagreement rates, then selectively labels only disagreements through an anytime-valid confidence sequence. The method achieves finite-sample validity with label-complexity bounds of order ρ²/ε², demonstrating significant label savings and strong empirical performance across 14,000+ audit streams.
StrictPRMBench is a replayable evaluation benchmark designed to audit fixed‑score PRM aggregation rules. It standardizes mathematical reasoning pools, scorer evidence, and deletion interventions so that different reducers confront identical selection problems. Across seven checkpoints and two benchmarks, the benchmark reveals that product aggregation yields higher deletion‑induced selection instability than geometric mean, with statistically significant differences in most cells.
The paper introduces First-Order In-Context Shapley, an inference‑only method that evaluates data utility for large language model alignment by computing the first‑order term of an in‑context cooperative game over semantic k‑NN neighborhoods in O(k) forward passes. It projects log‑likelihood shifts onto a directed influence graph, yielding three signals—Exemplifying Advantage, Exemplified Advantage, and One‑of‑a‑Kind Score—to identify high‑utility demonstrations and rare prompts. The approach reduces compute by 19× compared to Monte‑Carlo Shapley, filters 1–5% of records, and improves error detection and reward accuracy in DPO training and benchmark auditing. whyItMatters":"By enabling scalable, inference‑only data auditing, the method addresses label noise and safety inversions that hinder post‑training alignment of large language models, leading to measurable improvements in model reliability and reward accuracy."
arXiv:2609.39229v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic evaluation of faithfulness increasingly relies on a large language model acting as a judge, yet the most reliable judges are proprietary fr...
The paper evaluates CASCADE, a fully local layered defense for Model Context Protocol (MCP)-based systems, by conducting a component ablation and corpus audit on a fixed 5,000-sample dataset. It demonstrates that the choice of aggregation convention heavily influences reported metrics, that detection performance varies with provenance, and that the released configuration does not fully disclose the operating point. The study also shows that a local review model invoked for a third of requests does not alter classification outcomes, highlighting the importance of reproducibility and transparency in defense evaluations.