The paper introduces Active Testing, a framework that selects the most informative test samples for annotation in NLP, aiming to reduce human effort while accurately estimating model performance. Experiments across 18 datasets and 4 embedding strategies show up to 95% annotation savings with less than 1% loss in performance estimation accuracy. The authors also propose an adaptive stopping criterion to determine the optimal number of samples without a predefined budget.
arXiv:2509.20645v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Modern ML research increasingly faces an evaluation bottleneck: building benchmarks and running experiments is costly, slowing iteration. We...
The paper evaluates whether breaking down evaluation tasks into simpler sub‑tasks improves the LLM-as-a-judge (LLMaJ) framework for reference‑free NLG assessment. Systematic comparisons across multiple datasets show no performance advantage for LLMaJ methods that use task decomposition over a fair baseline that does not. The authors attribute previously reported gains to the use of human labels for training rather than to decomposition itself, and note that LLMaJ without decomposition can match human annotators when such labels are available.
arXiv:2605.24981v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Choosing a Large Language Model (LLM) for a given task requires comparing many strong candidates, yet standard evaluation relies on costly annotati...
arXiv:2606. 02837v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate translation from Natural Language to First-Order Logic (NL-to-FOL) underpins neurosymbolic AI systems and Natural Language Inference (NLI), making the quality of NL-to-FOL benchmarks essential -- yet these datasets have never been rigorously audited.
arXiv:2606. 02255v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Human annotation is the empirical foundation of much NLP research, from dataset construction to model evaluation, but papers often leave unclear who produced the annotations and how the annotation process was controlled.
The LLM-as-a-judge (LLMaJ) framework has emerged as a promising solution for cheap, reproducible, reference-free Natural Language Generation (NLG) evaluation. Prior work seeks to improve LLMaJ by deco...
arXiv:2606. 08718v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While Deep Active Learning (DAL) effectively reduces human annotation costs, its efficacy is constrained by human annotation errors.
arXiv:2609.37687v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Active test-time adaptation (ATTA) improves robustness under distribution shift by updating a deployed model during inference while selectively queryin...
Large Language Models (LLMs) are being tested as a cost‑effective alternative to human judgment for evaluating machine translation (MT). This study compares LLM agreement with human annotators on two MT quality schemes—Multidimensional Quality Metrics (MQM) and Error Span Annotation (ESA)—across 70 language pairs and public WMT23/25 data. Results show that while LLMs sometimes match or exceed human agreement, performance varies widely by scheme, language, and domain, and remains unreliable in many settings. The work also identifies specific challenges for both humans (e.g., fine‑grained MQM, low‑resource languages) and LLMs (e.g., minor errors, wrong language variants, span annotation).
The paper argues that calibration—how well a language model’s confidence aligns with its actual correctness—should be a standard evaluation metric for large language models (LLMs). It notes that while calibration metrics exist, they are rarely applied outside specialized NLP subfields, leading to unverified confidence scores in new models, datasets, and benchmarks. The authors highlight the risks of miscalibration both at deployment (overconfident errors causing harm) and in research workflows (affecting LLM-as-a-judge, synthetic data generation, and active learning). They call for every NLP subfield to pair its primary performance metric with a calibration score, treating calibration as an essential property of every model.
arXiv:2510. 20351v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly exposed to data contamination, i.
arXiv:2509. 17314v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Software increasingly relies on the emergent capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), from natural language understanding to program analysis and generation.