arXiv Computation and Language

Anchoring Bias in LLM-as-a-Judge Systems: Prior Scores Compromise Evaluation Independence

The study investigates how prior scores influence large language model (LLM) judgments in the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm. By testing three prompt conditions—no metadata, revision framing, and anchored metadata containing prior scores—the authors find that prior scores systematically bias evaluations, shifting ratings toward those scores across 192,000 attempts. The bias also affects categorical decisions, blocking 48% of error corrections and flipping 10.18% of correct judgments, and is not mitigated by Chain-of-Thought or a warning, underscoring the need for careful context engineering.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 25

Ask, Don't Judge: Binary Questions for Interpretable LLM Evaluation and Self-Improvement

Evaluating LLM outputs remains a major bottleneck in NLP: human evaluation is expensive and slow, lexical metrics correlate poorly with human judgments on open-ended generation, and holistic LLM judges often produce opaque scores that are hard to debug. We propose BINEVAL, a framework that decomposes evaluation criteria into atomic binary questions and aggregates the resulting verdicts into interpretable, multi-dimensional scores.

arXiv AI
Jun 26

Ask, Don't Judge: Binary Questions for Interpretable LLM Evaluation and Self-Improvement

arXiv:2606. 27226v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating LLM outputs remains a major bottleneck in NLP: human evaluation is expensive and slow, lexical metrics correlate poorly with human judgments on open-ended generation, and holistic LLM judges often produce opaque scores that are hard to debug.

By Sangwoo Cho, Kushal Chawla, Pengshan Cai, Zefang Liu, Chenyang Zhu, Shi-Xiong Zhang, Sambit Sahu
arXiv AI
Aug 20

Self- and Other-Labels Induce Bidirectional Bias in LLM Judges

The study investigates bias in large language model (LLM) judges by having ten LLMs evaluate narrative constraint selections rather than generated text. Results show that self-preference largely disappears under blind evaluation when quality and evaluator severity are controlled, but self- and other-labels alone shift scores bidirectionally when quality is matched. The authors conclude that authorship attribution drives evaluation bias and that open-ended, ground‑truth‑free tasks can effectively study LLM judge behavior.

By Songeun Chae, Min Kim, Donghoon Jung, Seojin Choi, Seohyon Jung
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

Using Human-LLM Disagreement to Improve Checklist-Based Quality Appraisal

arXiv:2608.20385v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Systematic reviews rely on quality appraisal of included studies, a process that is time-consuming and sensitive to ambiguity in checklist criteria. Al...

By Timo van der Kuil (Methodology and Statistics Utrecht University), Bruno Messina Coimbra (Methodology and Statistics Utrecht University), Mirjam van Zuiden (Clinical Psychology Utrecht University), Robert A. Bagheri (Methodology and Statistics Utrecht University), Rens van de Schoot (Methodology and Statistics Utrecht University), Klaas Dieleman (Methodology and Statistics Utrecht University), Berend Greijn (Methodology and Statistics Utrecht University), Stefan Houkes (Methodology and Statistics Utrecht University), Sebastiaan Rodenhuis (Methodology and Statistics Utrecht University), Elizabeth M. Grandfield (Methodology and Statistics Utrecht University)
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

Moral Sensitivity in LLMs: A Tiered Evaluation of Contextual Bias via Behavioral Profiling and Mechanistic Interpretability

arXiv:2605. 03217v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in settings that require nuanced ethical reasoning, yet existing bias evaluations treat model outputs as simply "biased" or "unbiased.

By Yash Aggarwal, Atmika Gorti, Vinija Jain, Aman Chadha, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Manas Gaur