arXiv Computation and Language

RubriX: A Fast, Fine-Tunable Non-Autoregressive Rubric Judge

arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 9

Evaluating Rubric Generation with Interventional Transfer

The paper introduces Interventional Transfer (IT), a method for evaluating rubric generation by assessing how two rubrics respond to perturbations that cause a pass/fail shift. IT reveals asymmetries in rubrics generated by different LLMs when applied to HealthBench, showing that improvements on one rubric do not reliably transfer to the other. The study contrasts IT with existing evaluation approaches, highlighting its ability to uncover these asymmetries.

By Erik Skalnes, Layne C. Price, Raviteja Anantha, Michael Oberst
arXiv AI
Oct 31

Rubricon: Automated Rubric Generation and Refinement for LLM Evaluation and Training

Rubricon is a pipeline that automatically generates and refines discriminative rubrics for evaluating large language models (LLMs) without requiring human preference labels or manual rubric creation. It samples multiple rubrics, selects the most discriminative ones, adds missing criteria, prunes misaligned or shallow criteria, and uses LLM self‑critique and observed pass rates to guide refinement. Across diverse LLM benchmarks, Rubricon’s rubrics achieve 9% better alignment with expert‑authored rubrics than other synthetic methods, and training a Qwen3.5‑9B model on HealthBench with Rubricon rubrics improves performance by 4.5% over the best alternative synthetic generator.

By Ulyana Tkachenko, Hui Wen Goh, Guram Gogia, Jonas Mueller
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

Can LLM-as-a-Judge Reliably Verify Rubrics in Agentic Scenarios?

The paper introduces RuVerBench, a benchmark with 2,458 instances for evaluating the reliability of Large Language Models acting as judges (LaaJ) in verifying rubric compliance within agentic scenarios such as deep research and agentic coding. It systematically meta‑evaluates frontier LLMs, revealing that even the most advanced models perform well yet still produce substantial noise. The study also examines how prompt design, batching, and majority voting affect verification accuracy, noting that weaker models are more prompt‑sensitive, batched verification trades accuracy for efficiency, and majority voting offers diminishing returns.

By Yangda Peng, Yunjia Qi, Haotian Xia, Guanzhong He, Xintong Shi, Richeng Xuan, Songyuanyi Lu, Yixian Liu, Zhichao Hu, Yuhong Liu, Hao Peng
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

JEV vs. LLMs as Rubric Judges: Cheaper, Faster, and Wrong in the Same Places

The study investigates whether Jev, a typed classifier that outputs probabilities over allowed answers without generating text, can replace large language model (LLM) rubric judges. Across nine panels from seven benchmarks, Jev’s accuracy differed significantly from LLM judges in only 8 of 27 paired comparisons, performing best on binary criteria and worse only on graded ones, while most other comparisons were inconclusive. In terms of cost and speed, Jev was 29 to 325 times cheaper and 30 to 220 times faster than the flash‑tier LLM judges, and a cascade approach that defers uncertain Jev verdicts to an LLM yielded only modest gains. whyItMatters":"The findings suggest that a lightweight classifier like Jev can serve as an efficient first‑stage evaluator, potentially reducing the reliance on expensive and slow LLM judges in automated grading pipelines."

By Delip Rao, Chris Callison-Burch
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 24

JEV vs. LLMs as Rubric Judges: Cheaper, Faster, and Wrong in the Same Places

The study compares Jev, a typed classifier that outputs probabilities over allowed answers, with three flash-tier LLM rubric judges across nine panels from seven benchmarks. Jev’s accuracy differs significantly from an LLM judge in only 8 of 27 paired comparisons, performing best on binary criteria and worse only on graded ones, while most other comparisons are inconclusive. In terms of cost and speed, Jev is 29 to 325 times cheaper and 30 to 220 times faster than the LLM judges, and a cascade that defers uncertain Jev verdicts to an LLM yields only modest gains of up to 2.0 points over the best single judge.

arXiv AI
Sep 25

Just Ask Jev: Reinforcement Learning for Calibrated Decisions as a Zero-Shot Detector of AI Alignment Failures

The paper introduces Jev, a reinforcement‑learning‑trained model that provides calibrated probability answers to typed questions about a single input in one call. Jev is evaluated on RLCDAlignBench, a benchmark covering ten alignment failures across 44 tests and five target models, achieving a median AUROC of 0.886 zero‑shot and outperforming supervised baselines on most tasks. The study shows that question wording has little impact, while contextual fields that encode labels are more influential, and that Jev matches human‑label agreement while being 63× cheaper than LLM‑judge scorers.

By Ruoqi Guo, Yi Liu, Gelei Deng, Yuekang Li, Lida Zhao, Yutao Wu, Simin Chen, Ying Zhang, Leo Yu Zhang
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