arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

Toward Robust LLM-Based Judges: Taxonomic Bias Evaluation and Debiasing Optimization

The paper introduces JudgeBiasBench, a benchmark that systematically quantifies judgment biases in large language model (LLM)-based judges across four dimensions and 12 bias types. It evaluates both generative and discriminative judges, revealing significant bias patterns that undermine reliability. The authors propose bias-aware training—reinforcement learning for generative judges and contrastive learning for discriminative judges—to reduce these biases while maintaining evaluation performance.

By Hongli Zhou, Hui Huang, Rui Zhang, Kehai Chen, Bing Xu, Conghui Zhu, Tiejun Zhao, Muyun Yang
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 14

Can We Trust LLM Judges: A Study of Capability-Dependent Biases and Multi-Judge Ensemble for Bias Calibration

The paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) used as judges in absolute scoring tasks exhibit systematic biases that compromise reliability. It shows that a judge’s task accuracy strongly predicts both its judging accuracy and its directional bias, yet more capable examinee models consistently receive more lenient judgments. To mitigate these biases, the authors propose a calibrated weighted majority voting (WMV) ensemble that estimates judges’ error rates from inter-judge agreement patterns, achieving near-oracle performance without labeled data and improving both accuracy and fairness.

By Gemma Zhang, Prachi Badarayani, Asmi Kumar, Sadid Hasan, Sulaiman Vesal
arXiv AI
2d ago

Prompt Lottery in LLM-as-a-Judge: Measuring and Mitigating Sensitivity to Syntactic Rephrasing

The paper introduces the "Prompt Lottery" phenomenon, where paraphrastic rephrasings of judge prompts in LLM-as-a-Judge (LLMaJ) lead to inconsistent judgments and can even reverse model rankings. A large-scale study across various tasks, judge families, and model backbones demonstrates that these prompt variations significantly alter evaluation outcomes. A user study shows that LLMaJ judges are 6–9 times more sensitive to prompt rephrasings than humans, and that aggregating multiple prompts improves robustness by focusing on consistent judgments.

By Ilija Subasic, Brett Levert, Andrew Rabinovich, Sajjad Pakdamansavoji, Zhao Chen