arXiv AI
Will the Judge Flip? Predicting Position-Sensitive LLM Judgments from Residual Stream Activations
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arXiv AI
Jul 10
When the Judge Changes, So Does the Measurement: Auditing LLM-as-Judge Reliability
arXiv:2607. 08535v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: An LLM-as-judge score can move even when the candidate responses stay fixed, simply because the evaluator has changed.
arXiv AI
6d ago
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 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.
arXiv AI
Aug 26
A Judge Should Know What Changed:Construct Validity for LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation
The paper introduces a two‑dimensional construct validity framework for evaluating large language models (LLMs) as judges, defining invariance (S) and sensitivity (R) to construct‑preserving and construct‑changing edits. Experiments across seven judges and four domains reveal high invariance (average S = 0.945) but low sensitivity (average R = 0.319), with sensitivity varying by edit type. Audits of public label sets show that surface‑only predictors can reproduce a substantial portion of labels, underscoring that high agreement does not guarantee construct validity.
arXiv AI
Aug 14
Jagged Judges: Epistemic Stability Under Silence, Pressure, and Persistence
arXiv:2608. 12645v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM judges have become central infrastructure for model evaluations, online grading, and reward modeling.
arXiv AI
Aug 25
Jagged Judges: Epistemic Stability Under Perturbation, Pressure, and Persistence
The paper introduces the Wiggle Framework, a unified stress test for assessing epistemic stability in large language model (LLM) judges. It evaluates judge robustness across three dimensions—Mechanical Consistency, Single-turn Conviction, and Multi-turn Persistence—using 9 frontier models on 14 judging tasks related to safety, toxicity, AI writing detection, and political-response evaluation. Results show significant instability, with verdict flips ranging from 25–71% under static pushback and 62–91% when challenged by an adversarial LLM, and highlight that successful pressure often misaligns with ground truth.