arXiv AI By Xing Zhang, Yanwei Cui, Guanghui Wang, Zhihao Lin, Peiyang He

Metrics That Write Themselves: Evolving an Evaluator from Its Own Blind Spots

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The paper introduces EvalCEGAR, a method that automatically evolves a metric for evaluating AI-generated answers by iteratively refining a pool of small Python operators that flag potential defects. By using counterexample-guided abstraction refinement, the system identifies pairs of answers that score identically but differ in correctness, prompting the metric to broaden its scope rather than resample. On benchmark datasets, the evolved 55‑line operator closes a significant portion of the performance gap compared to hand‑written metrics and outperforms a large‑language‑model judge that incurs a cost per candidate.

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