arXiv Machine Learning

Statistically Reliable LLM-Based Ranking Evaluation via Prediction-Powered Inference

arXiv:2606. 05308v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: With PRECISE, we extended Prediction-Powered Inference to produce bias-corrected estimates of ranking evaluation metrics by combining a small human-labeled set with a large LLM-judged set.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Which Metrics Save the Most Human Annotation? Prediction-Powered Evaluation and Meta-Evaluation

The paper introduces prediction‑powered evaluation, a framework that blends limited human judgments with large‑scale automatic scores to produce unbiased, data‑efficient system comparisons. It offers both parametric and non‑parametric methods, examines the trade‑off between paired and unpaired designs, and validates the approach on six WMT datasets. Additionally, the authors propose the Prediction‑Powered Saving Ratio (PPSR), a meta‑metric that quantifies how much human annotation can be saved by using an automatic metric within this framework, providing more discriminative and stable metric rankings than existing system‑level meta‑metrics.

By Mingqi Gao, Anthony Sicilia, Weiyan Shi
arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

Pair Difficulty Matters: Rethinking Pairwise LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation and Consistency

Large Language Model judges are commonly used to rank texts via pairwise comparison, with reliability traditionally measured by position bias, transitivity, and pairwise agreement. This paper argues that these proxies are misleading because they are dominated by close‑rank‑gap pairs, which contribute little to the overall ranking, while far‑gap pairs carry the true ranking signal. Experiments on simulations and human‑rated corpora show weak correlation between the proxies and actual ranking accuracy, suggesting judges should be evaluated using rank‑gap‑conditional metrics against human rankings.

By Bruno Brocai, Maria Becker
arXiv AI
6d ago

Accounting for Bias Enables Sustainable LLM Evaluation

The paper argues that the current LLM-as-a-judge evaluation method, which compensates for systematic measurement bias by increasing the number of comparisons, is statistically unsound and computationally wasteful. It identifies that treating LLM judges as neutral ignores documented biases such as position bias, verbosity bias, judge severity, and self‑enhancement. The authors propose a unified latent variable framework that jointly models pairwise and ordinal data while explicitly correcting for these confounders, enabling reliable rankings with far fewer comparisons and negligible additional compute.

By Harshita Katoch, David Antony Selby, Gerrit Gro{\ss}mann, Sebastian Vollmer
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

Post-hoc Alignment of LLM-judges to Human Judgment Distribution

The paper introduces NAPHA, a lightweight post‑hoc alignment method that improves large language model (LLM) predictions of human judgment distributions (HJD) by matching LLM output distributions to HJD through entropy‑based class assignment and specialized alignment models. Experiments on five datasets show that while LLMs perform near human‑level on hard‑label tasks, they struggle with soft‑label predictions, and NAPHA consistently enhances soft‑label accuracy, especially on high‑entropy instances. The study also demonstrates that better entropy class prediction can further boost NAPHA’s effectiveness.

By Sebastian Steindl, Nikos Voskarides, Alberto Gasparin, Diego Marcheggiani
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 21

BACON: Budgeted Human Calibration for Modeling and Evaluation with Multiple AI Judges

arXiv:2607. 16239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI judges offer a scalable, low-cost alternative to human evaluation, but their outputs can be biased relative to human preferences and highly item-dependent, varying across judges, tasks, and domains.

By Lei Shi, Anlan Zhang, Rita Lyu, Zhengmian Hu, Tong Yu, David Arbour, Avi Feller, Saayan Mitra, Ritwik Sinha