The paper examines LLM-as-a-Judge systems used to assess AI-generated text, questioning the assumption that judgments are derived from reasoning over responses and rubrics. It finds that classifiers trained solely on rubric text can predict judge outputs, indicating that rubrics contain recoverable evaluative signals independent of the responses. Counterfactual experiments show judges often fail to adjust decisions when either the response or rubric criterion is reversed, raising doubts about the reliability of rubric-based LLM evaluation.
By Anshul Bagaria, Sowmya S Sundaram, Gokul S Krishnan, Balaraman Ravindran
arXiv:2608.29856v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Large language models are increasingly used as scalable evaluators for open-ended tasks. However, many LLM judges derive query-specific criteria during...
By Yifan Chen, Haitao Li, Qingyao Ai, Fengbin Zhu, Tat-Seng Chua, Min Zhang, Yiqun Liu
arXiv:2608.22559v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Rubrics aim to make language-model evaluation transparent by decomposing response quality into interpretable criteria. However, natural-language rubric...
By Kaustubh D. Dhole, Charles L. A. Clarke, Eugene Y. Agichtein
The paper introduces SESSE, a training‑free framework that breaks down LLM‑as‑judge evaluations into five steps—Sketch, Expand, Sort, Summarize, Evaluate—by mining sub‑questions from the judge’s own error cases. It requires no oracle responses, task‑specific rubrics, or fine‑tuning, yet on RewardBench it matches the performance of chain‑of‑thought baselines and rivals a fine‑tuned specialist (RISE‑Judge‑32B). SESSE provides per‑criterion vote evidence, offering an interpretable audit trail that can diagnose label ambiguity and judge failure modes that a single holistic output token cannot reveal.
By Dae Lee, Mihai Delgeanu, Adel Youssef
arXiv:2601.08654v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Rubric-based text evaluation increasingly relies on large language models (LLMs) as scalable judges, yet frozen black-box models can interpret the...
By Yihan Hong, Huaiyuan Yao, Bolin Shen, Wanpeng Xu, Hua Wei, Yushun Dong
arXiv:2604. 06996v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: LLM-as-a-judge has become the de facto approach for evaluating LLM outputs.
By Jos\'e Pombal, Ricardo Rei, Andr\'e F. T. Martins