arXiv Machine Learning
Who Sets the Pace of Judge Hacking? Judge Capability versus the Policy-Judge Gap
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arXiv AI
Oct 2
The First Token Is Not the Verdict: Hidden Costs of Reading LLM Judges Without Generating
The paper demonstrates that reading a large language model (LLM) judge’s verdict from the logits of its first generated token—an approach used in constrained decoding and likelihood‑scoring evaluation—introduces a significant distortion in position bias. Because judges do not always start with a verdict token (12–49% of cases for Qwen3 judges and <3% for Llama‑3.1‑8B and Phi‑3.5‑mini), this readout often returns the first response rather than a true judgment, inflating position bias by up to 42 points while barely affecting judge accuracy. The authors recommend reporting the frequency with which a judge leads with a verdict token to provide a more accurate assessment of position bias.
arXiv AI
Aug 11
When the Judge Should Not Decide: Evidence-Locked, Non-Compensatory Selection Bounds LLM-Judge Failure in Reasoning Pipelines
arXiv:2608. 07813v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: An LLM judge deployed inside a reasoning pipeline does not merely measure quality, it decides which answer ships.
arXiv AI
Sep 2
Commit-first LLM judging inherits the judge's own errors
The paper investigates whether widely used evaluation frameworks for large language models (LLMs) implement a defense called commit‑first judging, which requires a judge to solve a task itself before accepting a candidate answer. Across 24 configurations in eight popular frameworks, none use the full commit‑first method; nine use a weaker variant that is ineffective. In controlled experiments, the weaker variant allowed systems to game the judge, while the full commit‑first approach eliminated this vulnerability but sometimes worsened evaluation when the judge’s own answer was incorrect.
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 8
More Convincing, Not More Correct: Self-Play Reward Hacking of Reference-Free LLM Judges
arXiv:2607. 05904v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training a language model against its own reference-free judgments (the premise of self-rewarding, self-play, and LLM-as-a-judge pipelines) assumes a model's verdict on a shown answer tracks correctness.
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 31
Commit-first LLM judging inherits the judge's own errors
LLM judges, models that score another system's output, can be gamed by the systems they score. Recent work identifies one defence that works: the judge solves the task itself first and commits to that...
arXiv AI
Jun 16
Who Drifted: the System or the Judge? Anytime-Valid Attribution in LLM Evaluation Pipelines
arXiv:2606. 15474v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Continuous evaluation of LLM products relies on a strong LLM judge treated as ground truth: a cheap monitor scores every interaction and a team is paged when the score drifts down.