arXiv AI

When Do LLMs Actually Help? Evaluating LLMs as Data Quality Annotators

The paper evaluates large language models (LLMs) as data quality annotators on two e-commerce tasks: entity matching and brand mislabeling. In entity matching, a simple rule-based baseline matched the LLM’s zero-shot performance (F1≈0.95), and a few-shot prompt actually lowered performance, highlighting the risk of small-sample prompt tuning. For brand mislabeling, the LLM outperformed a naive rule baseline (F1 0.833 vs 0.721) by leveraging background knowledge, and demonstrated high consistency across repeated runs (99.7% agreement).

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 Computation and Language
Aug 27

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.

By Ante Kapetanovic, Kemal Altwlkany, Andro Mercep, Tomislav Duricic, Emanuel Lacic
arXiv AI
Aug 24

When Do LLMs Replace Fine-Tuned NLU? A Decision Framework for Intent Detection in Production Conversational Systems

The paper evaluates whether zero‑shot large language models (LLMs) can replace fine‑tuned natural language understanding (NLU) classifiers for intent detection in conversational systems. Experiments on ATIS and CLINC150 show that fine‑tuned RoBERTa outperforms Claude Haiku zero‑shot when ample in‑domain labels are available, but the LLM matches the supervised model on the broader 150‑intent CLINC150 schema. The authors identify three production‑relevant scenarios where LLMs excel—out‑of‑scope detection, robustness to ASR noise, and dynamic per‑deployment schemas—and present a decision framework to guide practitioners. whyItMatters:"The study provides concrete evidence and a practical framework for deciding when to deploy LLMs versus fine‑tuned models in real‑world conversational applications."

By Carson Rodrigues, Oysturn Vas
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Style, Not Self: Surface Cues Explain Zero-Shot Code Attribution by Large Language Models

The study investigates whether large language models (LLMs) can identify code they have generated, potentially leading to self‑favoring or collusive behavior. Experiments across 15 model‑benchmark pairs show that models can attribute authorship with balanced accuracy between 49% and 58%, but this ability largely stems from superficial cues such as solution length. Removing surface features like docstrings, comments, and type hints reduces attribution accuracy to chance, indicating that surface cues drive the effect.

By Ehsan Barkhordar, Surendrabikram Thapa
arXiv AI
Oct 2

On-Device Named-Entity Recognition: A Deployability Study of Accuracy, Cost, Reliability, and Confidence

The paper evaluates nine on‑device named‑entity recognition models ranging from classical taggers to large language models, measuring not only accuracy but also latency and output validity. Using a silver‑gold benchmark derived from an LLM judge panel and a human‑validated corpus, the study shows that encoder‑based models achieve comparable accuracy to a 4 B instruct LLM while being much smaller, faster, and producing no malformed output. Confidence calibration of GLiNER is analyzed, revealing over‑confidence but improved reliability after temperature scaling and thresholding.

By Vinay Kumar Chaganti
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Measuring Brand and Source Discovery under Repeated LLM Queries: A Finite-Sample Audit

The study audits large language model (LLM) outputs by measuring how well repeated queries recover a collected set of responses versus the full set of possible outputs. Using sample-based rarefaction on 4,500 responses from 50 buying questions across six configurations, the authors find historical-dictionary median recovery rates between 92.6% and 95.2%, which drop to 89.5%–94.7% after re‑adjudicating all candidate strings. Additional analyses with Gemini 3.1 Pro annotations and matched roster data confirm that recovery percentages vary with extraction methods, question selection, and the finite reference collection, underscoring the need for explicit measurement definitions and sensitivity analyses in LLM audits.

By Dmitrij \.Zatuchin
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 11

Rethinking Verbalized Confidence for LLM-as-a-Judge: A Compatibility Shift on Post-2025 Proprietary Models

The paper argues that verbalized confidence—once viewed as overconfident and coarse—has become the preferred soft‑scoring method for LLM‑as‑a‑Judge on top‑tier proprietary models released after 2025. Experiments on SummEval, AggreFact, and HelpSteer2 across up to 18 LLMs show that log‑probabilities are no longer the best signal, and that adding an overconfidence advisory and self‑debate further improves calibration and robustness. The authors note that these enhancements incur little accuracy loss on post‑2025 models but do affect pre‑2025 ones, highlighting a compatibility shift in how confidence should be measured.

By Yu-Chung Hsiao