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Apr 22

xFinder: Large Language Models as Automated Evaluators for Reliable Evaluation

The continuous advancement of large language models (LLMs) has brought increasing attention to the critical issue of developing fair and reliable methods for evaluating their performance. Particularly, the emergence of cheating phenomena, such as test set leakage and prompt format overfitting, poses significant challenges to the reliable evaluation of LLMs. As evaluation frameworks commonly use Regular Expression (RegEx) for answer extraction, models may adjust their responses to fit formats easily handled by RegEx. Nevertheless, the key answer extraction module based on RegEx frequently suffers from extraction errors. Furthermore, recent studies proposing fine-tuned LLMs as judge models for automated evaluation face challenges in terms of generalization ability and fairness. This paper comprehensively analyzes the entire LLM evaluation chain and demonstrates that optimizing the key answer extraction module improves extraction accuracy and enhances evaluation reliability. Our findings suggest that improving the key answer extraction module can lead to higher judgment accuracy and improved evaluation efficiency compared to the judge models. To address these issues, we propose xFinder, a novel evaluator for answer extraction and matching in LLM evaluation. As part of this process, we create a specialized dataset, the Key Answer Finder (KAF) dataset, to ensure effective model training and evaluation. Generalization tests and real-world evaluations show that the smallest xFinder model, with only 500 million parameters, achieves an average extraction accuracy of 93.42\%. In contrast, RegEx accuracy in the best evaluation framework is 74.38\%. The final judgment accuracy of xFinder reaches 97.61\%, outperforming existing evaluation frameworks and judge models.

  • 7 authors
·
May 20, 2024

EdiVal-Agent: An Object-Centric Framework for Automated, Scalable, Fine-Grained Evaluation of Multi-Turn Editing

Instruction-based image editing has advanced rapidly, yet reliable and interpretable evaluation remains a bottleneck. Current protocols either (i) depend on paired reference images -- resulting in limited coverage and inheriting biases from prior generative models -- or (ii) rely solely on zero-shot vision-language models (VLMs), whose prompt-based assessments of instruction following, content consistency, and visual quality are often imprecise. To address this, we introduce EdiVal-Agent, an automated, scalable, and fine-grained evaluation framework for multi-turn instruction-based editing from an object-centric perspective, supported by a suite of expert tools. Given an image, EdiVal-Agent first decomposes it into semantically meaningful objects, then synthesizes diverse, context-aware editing instructions. For evaluation, it integrates VLMs with open-vocabulary object detectors to assess instruction following, uses semantic-level feature extractors to evaluate content consistency, and leverages human preference models to judge visual quality. We show that combining VLMs with object detectors yields stronger agreement with human judgments in instruction-following evaluation compared to using VLMs alone and CLIP-based metrics. Furthermore, the pipeline's modular design allows future tools to be seamlessly integrated, enhancing evaluation accuracy over time. Instantiating this pipeline, we build EdiVal-Bench, a multi-turn editing benchmark covering 9 instruction types and 11 state-of-the-art editing models spanning autoregressive (AR) (including Nano Banana, GPT-Image-1), flow-matching, and diffusion paradigms. We demonstrate that EdiVal-Agent can be used to identify existing failure modes, thereby informing the development of the next generation of editing models. Project page: https://tianyucodings.github.io/EdiVAL-page/.

  • 16 authors
·
Sep 16, 2025 2

ProImage-Bench: Rubric-Based Evaluation for Professional Image Generation

We study professional image generation, where a model must synthesize information-dense, scientifically precise illustrations from technical descriptions rather than merely produce visually plausible pictures. To quantify the progress, we introduce ProImage-Bench, a rubric-based benchmark that targets biology schematics, engineering/patent drawings, and general scientific diagrams. For 654 figures collected from real textbooks and technical reports, we construct detailed image instructions and a hierarchy of rubrics that decompose correctness into 6,076 criteria and 44,131 binary checks. Rubrics are derived from surrounding text and reference figures using large multimodal models, and are evaluated by an automated LMM-based judge with a principled penalty scheme that aggregates sub-question outcomes into interpretable criterion scores. We benchmark several representative text-to-image models on ProImage-Bench and find that, despite strong open-domain performance, the best base model reaches only 0.791 rubric accuracy and 0.553 criterion score overall, revealing substantial gaps in fine-grained scientific fidelity. Finally, we show that the same rubrics provide actionable supervision: feeding failed checks back into an editing model for iterative refinement boosts a strong generator from 0.653 to 0.865 in rubric accuracy and from 0.388 to 0.697 in criterion score. ProImage-Bench thus offers both a rigorous diagnostic for professional image generation and a scalable signal for improving specification-faithful scientific illustrations.

  • 12 authors
·
Dec 13, 2025

Benchmarking Adversarial Robustness to Bias Elicitation in Large Language Models: Scalable Automated Assessment with LLM-as-a-Judge

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized artificial intelligence, driving advancements in machine translation, summarization, and conversational agents. However, their increasing integration into critical societal domains has raised concerns about embedded biases, which can perpetuate stereotypes and compromise fairness. These biases stem from various sources, including historical inequalities in training data, linguistic imbalances, and adversarial manipulation. Despite mitigation efforts, recent studies indicate that LLMs remain vulnerable to adversarial attacks designed to elicit biased responses. This work proposes a scalable benchmarking framework to evaluate LLM robustness against adversarial bias elicitation. Our methodology involves (i) systematically probing models with a multi-task approach targeting biases across various sociocultural dimensions, (ii) quantifying robustness through safety scores using an LLM-as-a-Judge approach for automated assessment of model responses, and (iii) employing jailbreak techniques to investigate vulnerabilities in safety mechanisms. Our analysis examines prevalent biases in both small and large state-of-the-art models and their impact on model safety. Additionally, we assess the safety of domain-specific models fine-tuned for critical fields, such as medicine. Finally, we release a curated dataset of bias-related prompts, CLEAR-Bias, to facilitate systematic vulnerability benchmarking. Our findings reveal critical trade-offs between model size and safety, aiding the development of fairer and more robust future language models.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 10, 2025

Igniting Creative Writing in Small Language Models: LLM-as-a-Judge versus Multi-Agent Refined Rewards

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable creative writing capabilities, yet their substantial computational demands hinder widespread use. Enhancing Small Language Models (SLMs) offers a promising alternative, but current methods like Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) struggle with novelty, and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) is costly. This paper explores two distinct AI-driven reward strategies within a Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback (RLAIF) framework to ignite the creative writing of a 7B-parameter SLM, specifically for generating Chinese greetings. The first strategy employs a RM trained on high-quality preference data curated by a novel multi-agent rejection sampling framework designed for creative tasks. The second, more novel strategy utilizes a principle-guided LLM-as-a-Judge, whose reward function is optimized via an adversarial training scheme with a reflection mechanism, to directly provide reward signals. Comprehensive experiments reveal that while both approaches significantly enhance creative output over baselines, the principle-guided LLM-as-a-Judge demonstrably yields superior generation quality. Furthermore, it offers notable advantages in training efficiency and reduced dependency on human-annotated data, presenting a more scalable and effective path towards creative SLMs. Our automated evaluation methods also exhibit strong alignment with human judgments. Our code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/weixiaolong94-hub/Igniting-Creative-Writing-in-Small-Language-Models.

  • 7 authors
·
Aug 29, 2025

VideoAutoArena: An Automated Arena for Evaluating Large Multimodal Models in Video Analysis through User Simulation

Large multimodal models (LMMs) with advanced video analysis capabilities have recently garnered significant attention. However, most evaluations rely on traditional methods like multiple-choice questions in benchmarks such as VideoMME and LongVideoBench, which are prone to lack the depth needed to capture the complex demands of real-world users. To address this limitation-and due to the prohibitive cost and slow pace of human annotation for video tasks-we introduce VideoAutoArena, an arena-style benchmark inspired by LMSYS Chatbot Arena's framework, designed to automatically assess LMMs' video analysis abilities. VideoAutoArena utilizes user simulation to generate open-ended, adaptive questions that rigorously assess model performance in video understanding. The benchmark features an automated, scalable evaluation framework, incorporating a modified ELO Rating System for fair and continuous comparisons across multiple LMMs. To validate our automated judging system, we construct a 'gold standard' using a carefully curated subset of human annotations, demonstrating that our arena strongly aligns with human judgment while maintaining scalability. Additionally, we introduce a fault-driven evolution strategy, progressively increasing question complexity to push models toward handling more challenging video analysis scenarios. Experimental results demonstrate that VideoAutoArena effectively differentiates among state-of-the-art LMMs, providing insights into model strengths and areas for improvement. To further streamline our evaluation, we introduce VideoAutoBench as an auxiliary benchmark, where human annotators label winners in a subset of VideoAutoArena battles. We use GPT-4o as a judge to compare responses against these human-validated answers. Together, VideoAutoArena and VideoAutoBench offer a cost-effective, and scalable framework for evaluating LMMs in user-centric video analysis.

  • 6 authors
·
Nov 20, 2024 5

CodeUltraFeedback: An LLM-as-a-Judge Dataset for Aligning Large Language Models to Coding Preferences

Evaluating the alignment of large language models (LLMs) with user-defined coding preferences is a challenging endeavour that requires a deep assessment of LLMs' outputs. Existing methods and benchmarks rely primarily on automated metrics and static analysis tools, which often fail to capture the nuances of user instructions and LLM outputs. To address this gap, we propose using the LLM-as-a-Judge methodology to evaluate the alignment of LLMs with coding preferences. Based on this approach, we present CodeUltraFeedback, a comprehensive dataset designed to facilitate the evaluation and improvement of LLM alignment. CodeUltraFeedback consists of 10,000 coding instructions, each annotated with four responses generated from a diverse pool of 14 LLMs. These responses are ranked based on five distinct coding preferences using GPT-3.5 as a judge, providing both numerical scores and detailed textual feedback. Our analysis of CodeUltraFeedback reveals that responses from GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 are generally preferred over those from open-weight LLMs, highlighting significant differences in alignment between closed and open-weight models. In turn, we explore the usage of CodeUltraFeedback as feedback data to fine-tune and align CodeLlama-7B-Instruct using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement learning from AI feedback (RLAIF) with direct preference optimization (DPO). The resulting aligned CodeLlama-7B-Instruct model outperforms larger LLMs in terms of alignment with coding preferences and shows improved functional correctness on the HumanEval+ benchmark compared to the original instruct model. Therefore, our contributions bridge the gap in preference tuning of LLMs for code and set the stage for further advancements in model alignment and RLAIF in automated software engineering.

  • 3 authors
·
Mar 13, 2024

ELMES: An Automated Framework for Evaluating Large Language Models in Educational Scenarios

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents transformative opportunities for education, generating numerous novel application scenarios. However, significant challenges remain: evaluation metrics vary substantially across different educational scenarios, while many emerging scenarios lack appropriate assessment metrics. Current benchmarks predominantly measure general intelligence rather than pedagogical capabilities. To address this gap, we introduce ELMES, an open-source automated evaluation framework specifically designed for assessing LLMs in educational settings. ELMES features a modular architecture that enables researchers to create dynamic, multi-agent dialogues through simple configuration files, facilitating flexible scenario design without requiring extensive programming expertise. The framework incorporates a hybrid evaluation engine that objectively quantifies traditionally subjective pedagogical metrics using an LLM-as-a-Judge methodology. We conduct systematic benchmarking of state-of-the-art LLMs across four critical educational scenarios: Knowledge Point Explanation, Guided Problem-Solving Teaching, Interdisciplinary Lesson Plan Generation, and Contextualized Question Generation, employing fine-grained metrics developed in collaboration with education specialists. Our results demonstrate distinct capability distributions among models, revealing context-specific strengths and limitations. ELMES provides educators and researchers with an accessible evaluation framework that significantly reduces adaptation barriers for diverse educational applications while advancing the practical implementation of LLMs in pedagogy. The framework is publicly available at https://github.com/sii-research/elmes.git.

  • 12 authors
·
Jul 27, 2025

An LLM-as-Judge Metric for Bridging the Gap with Human Evaluation in SE Tasks

Large Language Models (LLMs) and other automated techniques have been increasingly used to support software developers by generating software artifacts such as code snippets, patches, and comments. However, accurately assessing the correctness of these generated artifacts remains a significant challenge. On one hand, human evaluation provides high accuracy but is labor-intensive and lacks scalability. On the other hand, many automatic evaluation metrics are scalable and require minimal human effort, but they often fail to accurately reflect the actual correctness of generated software artifacts. In this paper, we present SE-Jury, the first evaluation metric for LLM-as-Ensemble-Judge specifically designed to accurately assess the correctness of generated software artifacts. SE-Jury first defines five distinct evaluation strategies, each implemented by an independent judge. A dynamic team selection mechanism then identifies the most appropriate subset of judges as a team to produce a final correctness score through ensembling. We evaluate SE-Jury across a diverse set of software engineering (SE) benchmarks that span three popular SE tasks: code generation, automated program repair, and code summarization. Results demonstrate that SE-Jury consistently achieves a higher correlation with human judgments, with improvements ranging from 29.6% to 140.8% over existing automatic metrics. SE-Jury reaches agreement levels with human annotators that are close to inter-annotator agreement in code generation and program repair. These findings underscore SE-Jury's potential as a scalable and reliable alternative to human evaluation in these SE tasks.

  • 9 authors
·
May 27, 2025

TrustJudge: Inconsistencies of LLM-as-a-Judge and How to Alleviate Them

The adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) as automated evaluators (LLM-as-a-judge) has revealed critical inconsistencies in current evaluation frameworks. We identify two fundamental types of inconsistencies: (1) Score-Comparison Inconsistency, where lower-rated responses outperform higher-scored ones in pairwise comparisons, and (2) Pairwise Transitivity Inconsistency, manifested through circular preference chains (A>B>C>A) and equivalence contradictions (A=B=C\neq A). We argue that these issues come from information loss in discrete rating systems and ambiguous tie judgments during pairwise evaluation. We propose TrustJudge, a probabilistic framework that addresses these limitations through two key innovations: 1) distribution-sensitive scoring that computes continuous expectations from discrete rating probabilities, preserving information entropy for more precise scoring, and 2) likelihood-aware aggregation that resolves transitivity violations using bidirectional preference probabilities or perplexity. We also formalize the theoretical limitations of current LLM-as-a-judge frameworks and demonstrate how TrustJudge's components overcome them. When evaluated with Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct as judge using our dataset, TrustJudge reduces Score-Comparison inconsistency by 8.43% (from 23.32% to 14.89%) and Pairwise Transitivity inconsistency by 10.82% (from 15.22% to 4.40%), while maintaining higher evaluation accuracy. Our work provides the first systematic analysis of evaluation framework inconsistencies in LLM-as-a-judge paradigms, offering both theoretical insights and practical solutions for reliable automated assessment. The framework demonstrates consistent improvements across various model architectures and scales, enabling more trustworthy LLM evaluation without requiring additional training or human annotations. The codes can be found at https://github.com/TrustJudge/TrustJudge.

  • 14 authors
·
Sep 25, 2025 2

Assessing Judging Bias in Large Reasoning Models: An Empirical Study

Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) like DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI-o1 have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, raising important questions about their biases in LLM-as-a-judge settings. We present a comprehensive benchmark comparing judging biases between LLMs and LRMs across both subjective preference-alignment datasets and objective fact-based datasets. Through investigation of bandwagon, authority, position, and distraction biases, we uncover four key findings: (1) despite their advanced reasoning capabilities, LRMs remain susceptible to the above biases; (2) LRMs demonstrate better robustness than LLMs specifically on fact-related datasets; (3) LRMs exhibit notable position bias, preferring options in later positions; and (4) we identify a novel "superficial reflection bias" where phrases mimicking reasoning (e.g., "wait, let me think...") significantly influence model judgments. To address these biases, we design and evaluate three mitigation strategies: specialized system prompts that reduce judging biases by up to 19\% in preference alignment datasets and 14\% in fact-related datasets, in-context learning that provides up to 27\% improvement on preference tasks but shows inconsistent results on factual tasks, and a self-reflection mechanism that reduces biases by up to 10\% in preference datasets and 16\% in fact-related datasets, with self-reflection proving particularly effective for LRMs. Our work provides crucial insights for developing more reliable LLM-as-a-Judge frameworks, especially as LRMs become increasingly deployed as automated judges.

  • 8 authors
·
Apr 14, 2025

Judge Anything: MLLM as a Judge Across Any Modality

Evaluating generative foundation models on open-ended multimodal understanding (MMU) and generation (MMG) tasks across diverse modalities (e.g., images, audio, video) poses significant challenges due to the complexity of cross-modal interactions. To this end, the idea of utilizing Multimodal LLMs (MLLMs) as automated judges has emerged, with encouraging results in assessing vision-language understanding tasks. Moving further, this paper extends MLLM-as-a-Judge across modalities to a unified manner by introducing two benchmarks, TaskAnything and JudgeAnything, to respectively evaluate the overall performance and judging capabilities of MLLMs across any-to-any modality tasks. Specifically, TaskAnything evaluates the MMU and MMG capabilities across 15 any-to-any modality categories, employing 1,500 queries curated from well-established benchmarks. Furthermore, JudgeAnything evaluates the judging capabilities of 5 advanced (e.g., GPT-4o and Gemini-2.0-Flash) from the perspectives of Pair Comparison and Score Evaluation, providing a standardized testbed that incorporates human judgments and detailed rubrics. Our extensive experiments reveal that while these MLLMs show promise in assessing MMU (i.e., achieving an average of 66.55% in Pair Comparison setting and 42.79% in Score Evaluation setting), they encounter significant challenges with MMG tasks (i.e., averaging only 53.37% in Pair Comparison setting and 30.05% in Score Evaluation setting), exposing cross-modality biases and hallucination issues. To address this, we present OmniArena, an automated platform for evaluating omni-models and multimodal reward models. Our work highlights the need for fairer evaluation protocols and stronger alignment with human preferences. The source code and dataset are publicly available at: https://urrealhero.github.io/judgeanythingweb/.

  • 13 authors
·
Mar 21, 2025 2

Ferret: Faster and Effective Automated Red Teaming with Reward-Based Scoring Technique

In today's era, where large language models (LLMs) are integrated into numerous real-world applications, ensuring their safety and robustness is crucial for responsible AI usage. Automated red-teaming methods play a key role in this process by generating adversarial attacks to identify and mitigate potential vulnerabilities in these models. However, existing methods often struggle with slow performance, limited categorical diversity, and high resource demands. While Rainbow Teaming, a recent approach, addresses the diversity challenge by framing adversarial prompt generation as a quality-diversity search, it remains slow and requires a large fine-tuned mutator for optimal performance. To overcome these limitations, we propose Ferret, a novel approach that builds upon Rainbow Teaming by generating multiple adversarial prompt mutations per iteration and using a scoring function to rank and select the most effective adversarial prompt. We explore various scoring functions, including reward models, Llama Guard, and LLM-as-a-judge, to rank adversarial mutations based on their potential harm to improve the efficiency of the search for harmful mutations. Our results demonstrate that Ferret, utilizing a reward model as a scoring function, improves the overall attack success rate (ASR) to 95%, which is 46% higher than Rainbow Teaming. Additionally, Ferret reduces the time needed to achieve a 90% ASR by 15.2% compared to the baseline and generates adversarial prompts that are transferable i.e. effective on other LLMs of larger size. Our codes are available at https://github.com/declare-lab/ferret.

  • 4 authors
·
Aug 20, 2024 2

Game On: Towards Language Models as RL Experimenters

We propose an agent architecture that automates parts of the common reinforcement learning experiment workflow, to enable automated mastery of control domains for embodied agents. To do so, it leverages a VLM to perform some of the capabilities normally required of a human experimenter, including the monitoring and analysis of experiment progress, the proposition of new tasks based on past successes and failures of the agent, decomposing tasks into a sequence of subtasks (skills), and retrieval of the skill to execute - enabling our system to build automated curricula for learning. We believe this is one of the first proposals for a system that leverages a VLM throughout the full experiment cycle of reinforcement learning. We provide a first prototype of this system, and examine the feasibility of current models and techniques for the desired level of automation. For this, we use a standard Gemini model, without additional fine-tuning, to provide a curriculum of skills to a language-conditioned Actor-Critic algorithm, in order to steer data collection so as to aid learning new skills. Data collected in this way is shown to be useful for learning and iteratively improving control policies in a robotics domain. Additional examination of the ability of the system to build a growing library of skills, and to judge the progress of the training of those skills, also shows promising results, suggesting that the proposed architecture provides a potential recipe for fully automated mastery of tasks and domains for embodied agents.

  • 5 authors
·
Sep 5, 2024

Evaluating RAG-Fusion with RAGElo: an Automated Elo-based Framework

Challenges in the automated evaluation of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Question-Answering (QA) systems include hallucination problems in domain-specific knowledge and the lack of gold standard benchmarks for company internal tasks. This results in difficulties in evaluating RAG variations, like RAG-Fusion (RAGF), in the context of a product QA task at Infineon Technologies. To solve these problems, we propose a comprehensive evaluation framework, which leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate large datasets of synthetic queries based on real user queries and in-domain documents, uses LLM-as-a-judge to rate retrieved documents and answers, evaluates the quality of answers, and ranks different variants of Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) agents with RAGElo's automated Elo-based competition. LLM-as-a-judge rating of a random sample of synthetic queries shows a moderate, positive correlation with domain expert scoring in relevance, accuracy, completeness, and precision. While RAGF outperformed RAG in Elo score, a significance analysis against expert annotations also shows that RAGF significantly outperforms RAG in completeness, but underperforms in precision. In addition, Infineon's RAGF assistant demonstrated slightly higher performance in document relevance based on MRR@5 scores. We find that RAGElo positively aligns with the preferences of human annotators, though due caution is still required. Finally, RAGF's approach leads to more complete answers based on expert annotations and better answers overall based on RAGElo's evaluation criteria.

  • 3 authors
·
Jun 20, 2024 2

Is this Idea Novel? An Automated Benchmark for Judgment of Research Ideas

Judging the novelty of research ideas is crucial for advancing science, enabling the identification of unexplored directions, and ensuring contributions meaningfully extend existing knowledge rather than reiterate minor variations. However, given the exponential growth of scientific literature, manually judging the novelty of research ideas through literature reviews is labor-intensive, subjective, and infeasible at scale. Therefore, recent efforts have proposed automated approaches for research idea novelty judgment. Yet, evaluation of these approaches remains largely inconsistent and is typically based on non-standardized human evaluations, hindering large-scale, comparable evaluations. To address this, we introduce RINoBench, the first comprehensive benchmark for large-scale evaluation of research idea novelty judgments. It comprises 1,381 research ideas derived from and judged by human experts as well as nine automated evaluation metrics designed to assess both rubric-based novelty scores and textual justifications of novelty judgments. Using this benchmark, we evaluate several state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) on their ability to judge the novelty of research ideas. Our findings reveal that while LLM-generated reasoning closely mirrors human rationales, this alignment does not reliably translate into accurate novelty judgments, which diverge significantly from human gold standard judgments - even among leading reasoning-capable models. Data and code available at: https://github.com/TimSchopf/RINoBench.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 10

Video SimpleQA: Towards Factuality Evaluation in Large Video Language Models

Recent advancements in Large Video Language Models (LVLMs) have highlighted their potential for multi-modal understanding, yet evaluating their factual grounding in video contexts remains a critical unsolved challenge. To address this gap, we introduce Video SimpleQA, the first comprehensive benchmark tailored for factuality evaluation of LVLMs. Our work distinguishes from existing video benchmarks through the following key features: 1) Knowledge required: demanding integration of external knowledge beyond the explicit narrative; 2) Fact-seeking question: targeting objective, undisputed events or relationships, avoiding subjective interpretation; 3) Definitive & short-form answer: Answers are crafted as unambiguous and definitively correct in a short format, enabling automated evaluation through LLM-as-a-judge frameworks with minimal scoring variance; 4) External-source verified: All annotations undergo rigorous validation against authoritative external references to ensure the reliability; 5) Temporal reasoning required: The annotated question types encompass both static single-frame understanding and dynamic temporal reasoning, explicitly evaluating LVLMs factuality under the long-context dependencies. We extensively evaluate 41 state-of-the-art LVLMs and summarize key findings as follows: 1) Current LVLMs exhibit notable deficiencies in factual adherence, particularly for open-source models. The best-performing model Gemini-1.5-Pro achieves merely an F-score of 54.4%; 2) Test-time compute paradigms show insignificant performance gains, revealing fundamental constraints for enhancing factuality through post-hoc computation; 3) Retrieval-Augmented Generation demonstrates consistent improvements at the cost of additional inference time overhead, presenting a critical efficiency-performance trade-off.

  • 11 authors
·
Mar 24, 2025 1

CompassJudger-1: All-in-one Judge Model Helps Model Evaluation and Evolution

Efficient and accurate evaluation is crucial for the continuous improvement of large language models (LLMs). Among various assessment methods, subjective evaluation has garnered significant attention due to its superior alignment with real-world usage scenarios and human preferences. However, human-based evaluations are costly and lack reproducibility, making precise automated evaluators (judgers) vital in this process. In this report, we introduce CompassJudger-1, the first open-source all-in-one judge LLM. CompassJudger-1 is a general-purpose LLM that demonstrates remarkable versatility. It is capable of: 1. Performing unitary scoring and two-model comparisons as a reward model; 2. Conducting evaluations according to specified formats; 3. Generating critiques; 4. Executing diverse tasks like a general LLM. To assess the evaluation capabilities of different judge models under a unified setting, we have also established JudgerBench, a new benchmark that encompasses various subjective evaluation tasks and covers a wide range of topics. CompassJudger-1 offers a comprehensive solution for various evaluation tasks while maintaining the flexibility to adapt to diverse requirements. Both CompassJudger and JudgerBench are released and available to the research community athttps://github.com/open-compass/CompassJudger. We believe that by open-sourcing these tools, we can foster collaboration and accelerate progress in LLM evaluation methodologies.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 21, 2024 2

Does Context Matter? ContextualJudgeBench for Evaluating LLM-based Judges in Contextual Settings

The large language model (LLM)-as-judge paradigm has been used to meet the demand for a cheap, reliable, and fast evaluation of model outputs during AI system development and post-deployment monitoring. While judge models -- LLMs finetuned to specialize in assessing and critiquing model outputs -- have been touted as general purpose evaluators, they are typically evaluated only on non-contextual scenarios, such as instruction following. The omission of contextual settings -- those where external information is used as context to generate an output -- is surprising given the increasing prevalence of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and summarization use cases. Contextual assessment is uniquely challenging, as evaluation often depends on practitioner priorities, leading to conditional evaluation criteria (e.g., comparing responses based on factuality and then considering completeness if they are equally factual). To address the gap, we propose ContextualJudgeBench, a judge benchmark with 2,000 challenging response pairs across eight splits inspired by real-world contextual evaluation scenarios. We build our benchmark with a multi-pronged data construction pipeline that leverages both existing human annotations and model-based perturbations. Our comprehensive study across 11 judge models and 9 general purpose models, reveals that the contextual information and its assessment criteria present a significant challenge to even state-of-the-art models. For example, OpenAI's o1, the best-performing model, barely reaches 55% consistent accuracy.

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 19, 2025

Improve LLM-as-a-Judge Ability as a General Ability

LLM-as-a-Judge leverages the generative and reasoning capabilities of large language models (LLMs) to evaluate LLM responses across diverse scenarios, providing accurate preference signals. This approach plays a vital role in aligning LLMs with human values, ensuring ethical and reliable AI outputs that align with societal norms. Recent studies have raised many methods to train LLM as generative judges, but most of them are data consuming or lack accuracy, and only focus on LLM's judge ability. In this work, we regard judge ability as a general ability of LLM and implement a two-stage training approach, comprising supervised fine-tuning (SFT) warm-up and direct preference optimization (DPO) enhancement, to achieve judge style adaptation and improve judgment accuracy. Additionally, we introduce an efficient data synthesis method to generate judgmental content. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach, utilizing only about 2% to 40% of the data required by other methods, achieves SOTA performance on RewardBench. Furthermore, our training method enhances the general capabilities of the model by constructing complicated judge task, and the judge signals provided by our model have significantly enhanced the downstream DPO training performance of our internal models in our test to optimize policy model with Judge Model. We also open-source our model weights and training data to facilitate further research.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 17, 2025

JudgeBoard: Benchmarking and Enhancing Small Language Models for Reasoning Evaluation

While small language models (SLMs) have shown promise on various reasoning tasks, their ability to judge the correctness of answers remains unclear compared to large language models (LLMs). Prior work on LLM-as-a-judge frameworks typically relies on comparing candidate answers against ground-truth labels or other candidate answers using predefined metrics like entailment. However, this approach is inherently indirect and difficult to fully automate, offering limited support for fine-grained and scalable evaluation of reasoning outputs. In this work, we propose JudgeBoard, a novel evaluation pipeline that directly queries models to assess the correctness of candidate answers without requiring extra answer comparisons. We focus on two core reasoning domains: mathematical reasoning and science/commonsense reasoning, and construct task-specific evaluation leaderboards using both accuracy-based ranking and an Elo-based rating system across five benchmark datasets, enabling consistent model comparison as judges rather than comparators. To improve judgment performance in lightweight models, we propose MAJ (Multi-Agent Judging), a novel multi-agent evaluation framework that leverages multiple interacting SLMs with distinct reasoning profiles to approximate LLM-level judgment accuracy through collaborative deliberation. Experimental results reveal a significant performance gap between SLMs and LLMs in isolated judging tasks. However, our MAJ framework substantially improves the reliability and consistency of SLMs. On the MATH dataset, MAJ using smaller-sized models as backbones performs comparatively well or even better than their larger-sized counterparts. Our findings highlight that multi-agent SLM systems can potentially match or exceed LLM performance in judgment tasks, with implications for scalable and efficient assessment.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 19, 2025

JudgeBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-based Judges

LLM-based judges have emerged as a scalable alternative to human evaluation and are increasingly used to assess, compare, and improve models. However, the reliability of LLM-based judges themselves is rarely scrutinized. As LLMs become more advanced, their responses grow more sophisticated, requiring stronger judges to evaluate them. Existing benchmarks primarily focus on a judge's alignment with human preferences, but often fail to account for more challenging tasks where crowdsourced human preference is a poor indicator of factual and logical correctness. To address this, we propose a novel evaluation framework to objectively evaluate LLM-based judges. Based on this framework, we propose JudgeBench, a benchmark for evaluating LLM-based judges on challenging response pairs spanning knowledge, reasoning, math, and coding. JudgeBench leverages a novel pipeline for converting existing difficult datasets into challenging response pairs with preference labels reflecting objective correctness. Our comprehensive evaluation on a collection of prompted judges, fine-tuned judges, multi-agent judges, and reward models shows that JudgeBench poses a significantly greater challenge than previous benchmarks, with many strong models (e.g., GPT-4o) performing just slightly better than random guessing. Overall, JudgeBench offers a reliable platform for assessing increasingly advanced LLM-based judges. Data and code are available at https://github.com/ScalerLab/JudgeBench .

  • 8 authors
·
Oct 16, 2024 2

Judging the Judges: Evaluating Alignment and Vulnerabilities in LLMs-as-Judges

Offering a promising solution to the scalability challenges associated with human evaluation, the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm is rapidly gaining traction as an approach to evaluating large language models (LLMs). However, there are still many open questions about the strengths and weaknesses of this paradigm, and what potential biases it may hold. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of the performance of various LLMs acting as judges. We leverage TriviaQA as a benchmark for assessing objective knowledge reasoning of LLMs and evaluate them alongside human annotations which we found to have a high inter-annotator agreement. Our study includes 9 judge models and 9 exam taker models -- both base and instruction-tuned. We assess the judge model's alignment across different model sizes, families, and judge prompts. Among other results, our research rediscovers the importance of using Cohen's kappa as a metric of alignment as opposed to simple percent agreement, showing that judges with high percent agreement can still assign vastly different scores. We find that both Llama-3 70B and GPT-4 Turbo have an excellent alignment with humans, but in terms of ranking exam taker models, they are outperformed by both JudgeLM-7B and the lexical judge Contains, which have up to 34 points lower human alignment. Through error analysis and various other studies, including the effects of instruction length and leniency bias, we hope to provide valuable lessons for using LLMs as judges in the future.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 18, 2024 5

Large Language Models as Automated Aligners for benchmarking Vision-Language Models

With the advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs), Vision-Language Models (VLMs) have reached a new level of sophistication, showing notable competence in executing intricate cognition and reasoning tasks. However, existing evaluation benchmarks, primarily relying on rigid, hand-crafted datasets to measure task-specific performance, face significant limitations in assessing the alignment of these increasingly anthropomorphic models with human intelligence. In this work, we address the limitations via Auto-Bench, which delves into exploring LLMs as proficient aligners, measuring the alignment between VLMs and human intelligence and value through automatic data curation and assessment. Specifically, for data curation, Auto-Bench utilizes LLMs (e.g., GPT-4) to automatically generate a vast set of question-answer-reasoning triplets via prompting on visual symbolic representations (e.g., captions, object locations, instance relationships, and etc.). The curated data closely matches human intent, owing to the extensive world knowledge embedded in LLMs. Through this pipeline, a total of 28.5K human-verified and 3,504K unfiltered question-answer-reasoning triplets have been curated, covering 4 primary abilities and 16 sub-abilities. We subsequently engage LLMs like GPT-3.5 to serve as judges, implementing the quantitative and qualitative automated assessments to facilitate a comprehensive evaluation of VLMs. Our validation results reveal that LLMs are proficient in both evaluation data curation and model assessment, achieving an average agreement rate of 85%. We envision Auto-Bench as a flexible, scalable, and comprehensive benchmark for evaluating the evolving sophisticated VLMs.

  • 7 authors
·
Nov 24, 2023

EmergentTTS-Eval: Evaluating TTS Models on Complex Prosodic, Expressiveness, and Linguistic Challenges Using Model-as-a-Judge

Text-to-Speech (TTS) benchmarks often fail to capture how well models handle nuanced and semantically complex text. Building on EmergentTTS, we introduce EmergentTTS-Eval, a comprehensive benchmark covering six challenging TTS scenarios: emotions, paralinguistics, foreign words, syntactic complexity, complex pronunciation (e.g. URLs, formulas), and questions. Crucially, our framework automates both test-case generation and evaluation, making the benchmark easily extensible. Starting from a small set of human-written seed prompts, we iteratively extend them using LLMs to target specific structural, phonetic and prosodic challenges, resulting in 1,645 diverse test cases. Moreover, we employ a model-as-a-judge approach, using a Large Audio Language Model (LALM) to assess the speech across multiple dimensions such as expressed emotion, prosodic, intonational, and pronunciation accuracy. We evaluate state-of-the-art open-source and proprietary TTS systems, such as 11Labs, Deepgram, and OpenAI's 4o-mini-TTS, on EmergentTTS-Eval, demonstrating its ability to reveal fine-grained performance differences. Results show that the model-as-a-judge approach offers robust TTS assessment and a high correlation with human preferences. We open source the evaluation https://github.com/boson-ai/EmergentTTS-Eval-public{code} and the https://huggingface.co/datasets/bosonai/EmergentTTS-Eval{dataset}.

  • 5 authors
·
May 28, 2025 2

Reverse Engineering Human Preferences with Reinforcement Learning

The capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) are routinely evaluated by other LLMs trained to predict human preferences. This framework--known as LLM-as-a-judge--is highly scalable and relatively low cost. However, it is also vulnerable to malicious exploitation, as LLM responses can be tuned to overfit the preferences of the judge. Previous work shows that the answers generated by a candidate-LLM can be edited post hoc to maximise the score assigned to them by a judge-LLM. In this study, we adopt a different approach and use the signal provided by judge-LLMs as a reward to adversarially tune models that generate text preambles designed to boost downstream performance. We find that frozen LLMs pipelined with these models attain higher LLM-evaluation scores than existing frameworks. Crucially, unlike other frameworks which intervene directly on the model's response, our method is virtually undetectable. We also demonstrate that the effectiveness of the tuned preamble generator transfers when the candidate-LLM and the judge-LLM are replaced with models that are not used during training. These findings raise important questions about the design of more reliable LLM-as-a-judge evaluation settings. They also demonstrate that human preferences can be reverse engineered effectively, by pipelining LLMs to optimise upstream preambles via reinforcement learning--an approach that could find future applications in diverse tasks and domains beyond adversarial attacks.

  • 6 authors
·
May 21, 2025

Generative Judge for Evaluating Alignment

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has substantially expanded the range of tasks they can address. In the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), researchers have shifted their focus from conventional NLP tasks (e.g., sequence tagging and parsing) towards tasks that revolve around aligning with human needs (e.g., brainstorming and email writing). This shift in task distribution imposes new requirements on evaluating these aligned models regarding generality (i.e., assessing performance across diverse scenarios), flexibility (i.e., examining under different protocols), and interpretability (i.e., scrutinizing models with explanations). In this paper, we propose a generative judge with 13B parameters, Auto-J, designed to address these challenges. Our model is trained on user queries and LLM-generated responses under massive real-world scenarios and accommodates diverse evaluation protocols (e.g., pairwise response comparison and single-response evaluation) with well-structured natural language critiques. To demonstrate the efficacy of our approach, we construct a new testbed covering 58 different scenarios. Experimentally, Auto-J outperforms a series of strong competitors, including both open-source and closed-source models, by a large margin. We also provide detailed analysis and case studies to further reveal the potential of our method and make a variety of resources public at https://github.com/GAIR-NLP/auto-j.

  • 6 authors
·
Oct 9, 2023

Judging the Judges: A Collection of LLM-Generated Relevance Judgements

Using Large Language Models (LLMs) for relevance assessments offers promising opportunities to improve Information Retrieval (IR), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and related fields. Indeed, LLMs hold the promise of allowing IR experimenters to build evaluation collections with a fraction of the manual human labor currently required. This could help with fresh topics on which there is still limited knowledge and could mitigate the challenges of evaluating ranking systems in low-resource scenarios, where it is challenging to find human annotators. Given the fast-paced recent developments in the domain, many questions concerning LLMs as assessors are yet to be answered. Among the aspects that require further investigation, we can list the impact of various components in a relevance judgment generation pipeline, such as the prompt used or the LLM chosen. This paper benchmarks and reports on the results of a large-scale automatic relevance judgment evaluation, the LLMJudge challenge at SIGIR 2024, where different relevance assessment approaches were proposed. In detail, we release and benchmark 42 LLM-generated labels of the TREC 2023 Deep Learning track relevance judgments produced by eight international teams who participated in the challenge. Given their diverse nature, these automatically generated relevance judgments can help the community not only investigate systematic biases caused by LLMs but also explore the effectiveness of ensemble models, analyze the trade-offs between different models and human assessors, and advance methodologies for improving automated evaluation techniques. The released resource is available at the following link: https://llm4eval.github.io/LLMJudge-benchmark/

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 19, 2025 2

RocketEval: Efficient Automated LLM Evaluation via Grading Checklist

Evaluating large language models (LLMs) in diverse and challenging scenarios is essential to align them with human preferences. To mitigate the prohibitive costs associated with human evaluations, utilizing a powerful LLM as a judge has emerged as a favored approach. Nevertheless, this methodology encounters several challenges, including substantial expenses, concerns regarding privacy and security, and reproducibility. In this paper, we propose a straightforward, replicable, and accurate automated evaluation method by leveraging a lightweight LLM as the judge, named RocketEval. Initially, we identify that the performance disparity between lightweight and powerful LLMs in evaluation tasks primarily stems from their ability to conduct comprehensive analyses, which is not easily enhanced through techniques such as chain-of-thought reasoning. By reframing the evaluation task as a multi-faceted Q&A using an instance-specific checklist, we demonstrate that the limited judgment accuracy of lightweight LLMs is largely attributes to high uncertainty and positional bias. To address these challenges, we introduce an automated evaluation process grounded in checklist grading, which is designed to accommodate a variety of scenarios and questions. This process encompasses the creation of checklists, the grading of these checklists by lightweight LLMs, and the reweighting of checklist items to align with the supervised annotations. Our experiments carried out on the automated evaluation benchmarks, MT-Bench and WildBench datasets, reveal that RocketEval, when using Gemma-2-2B as the judge, achieves a high correlation (0.965) with human preferences, which is comparable to GPT-4o. Moreover, RocketEval provides a cost reduction exceeding 50-fold for large-scale evaluation and comparison scenarios. Our code is available at https://github.com/Joinn99/RocketEval-ICLR .

  • 5 authors
·
Mar 6, 2025

LLMs-as-Judges: A Comprehensive Survey on LLM-based Evaluation Methods

The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has driven their expanding application across various fields. One of the most promising applications is their role as evaluators based on natural language responses, referred to as ''LLMs-as-judges''. This framework has attracted growing attention from both academia and industry due to their excellent effectiveness, ability to generalize across tasks, and interpretability in the form of natural language. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the LLMs-as-judges paradigm from five key perspectives: Functionality, Methodology, Applications, Meta-evaluation, and Limitations. We begin by providing a systematic definition of LLMs-as-Judges and introduce their functionality (Why use LLM judges?). Then we address methodology to construct an evaluation system with LLMs (How to use LLM judges?). Additionally, we investigate the potential domains for their application (Where to use LLM judges?) and discuss methods for evaluating them in various contexts (How to evaluate LLM judges?). Finally, we provide a detailed analysis of the limitations of LLM judges and discuss potential future directions. Through a structured and comprehensive analysis, we aim aims to provide insights on the development and application of LLMs-as-judges in both research and practice. We will continue to maintain the relevant resource list at https://github.com/CSHaitao/Awesome-LLMs-as-Judges.

  • 8 authors
·
Dec 7, 2024

Self-Judge: Selective Instruction Following with Alignment Self-Evaluation

Pre-trained large language models (LLMs) can be tailored to adhere to human instructions through instruction tuning. However, due to shifts in the distribution of test-time data, they may not always execute instructions accurately, potentially generating factual errors or misaligned content when acting as chat assistants. To enhance the reliability of LLMs in following instructions, we propose the study of selective instruction following, whereby the system declines to execute instructions if the anticipated response quality is low. We train judge models that can predict numerical quality scores for model responses. To address data scarcity, we introduce Self-J, a novel self-training framework for developing judge models without needing human-annotated quality scores. Our method leverages the model's inherent self-evaluation capability to extract information about response quality from labeled instruction-tuning data. It incorporates a gold reference answer to facilitate self-evaluation and recalibrates by assessing the semantic similarity between the response sample and the gold reference. During the training phase, we implement self-distillation as a regularization technique to enhance the capability of reference-free estimation. To validate alignment evaluation on general instruction-following tasks, we collect large-scale high-quality instructions from Hugging Face for model training and evaluation. Extensive experiments on five open-source models show that our method correlates much more with GPT-4 than strong baselines, e.g., supervised models distilled from GPT-4 and GPT-3.5-turbo. Our analysis shows our model's strong generalization across domains. Additionally, our judge models serve as good reward models, e.g., boosting WizardLM-13B-V1.2 from 89.17 to 92.48 and from 12.03 to 15.90 in version v1 and v2 of AlpacaEval respectively using best-of-32 sampling with our judge models.

  • 2 authors
·
Sep 2, 2024

Self-rationalization improves LLM as a fine-grained judge

LLM-as-a-judge models have been used for evaluating both human and AI generated content, specifically by providing scores and rationales. Rationales, in addition to increasing transparency, help models learn to calibrate its judgments. Enhancing a model's rationale can therefore improve its calibration abilities and ultimately the ability to score content. We introduce Self-Rationalization, an iterative process of improving the rationales for the judge models, which consequently improves the score for fine-grained customizable scoring criteria (i.e., likert-scale scoring with arbitrary evaluation criteria). Self-rationalization works by having the model generate multiple judgments with rationales for the same input, curating a preference pair dataset from its own judgements, and iteratively fine-tuning the judge via DPO. Intuitively, this approach allows the judge model to self-improve by learning from its own rationales, leading to better alignment and evaluation accuracy. After just two iterations -- while only relying on examples in the training set -- human evaluation shows that our judge model learns to produce higher quality rationales, with a win rate of 62% on average compared to models just trained via SFT on rationale . This judge model also achieves high scoring accuracy on BigGen Bench and Reward Bench, outperforming even bigger sized models trained using SFT with rationale, self-consistency or best-of-N sampling by 3% to 9%.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 7, 2024

RubricRAG: Towards Interpretable and Reliable LLM Evaluation via Domain Knowledge Retrieval for Rubric Generation

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated and sometimes trained using automated graders such as LLM-as-judges that output scalar scores or preferences. While convenient, these approaches are often opaque: a single score rarely explains why an answer is good or bad, which requirements were missed, or how a system should be improved. This lack of interpretability limits their usefulness for model development, dataset curation, and high-stakes deployment. Query-specific rubric-based evaluation offers a more transparent alternative by decomposing quality into explicit, checkable criteria. However, manually designing high-quality, query-specific rubrics is labor-intensive and cognitively demanding and not feasible for deployment. While previous approaches have focused on generating intermediate rubrics for automated downstream evaluation, it is unclear if these rubrics are both interpretable and effective for human users. In this work, we investigate whether LLMs can generate useful, instance-specific rubrics as compared to human-authored rubrics, while also improving effectiveness for identifying good responses. Through our systematic study on two rubric benchmarks, and on multiple few-shot and post-training strategies, we find that off-the-shelf LLMs produce rubrics that are poorly aligned with human-authored ones. We introduce a simple strategy, RubricRAG, which retrieves domain knowledge via rubrics at inference time from related queries. We demonstrate that RubricRAG can generate more interpretable rubrics both for similarity to human-authored rubrics, and for improved downstream evaluation effectiveness. Our results highlight both the challenges and a promising approach of scalable, interpretable evaluation through automated rubric generation.

  • 2 authors
·
Mar 21

LitBench: A Benchmark and Dataset for Reliable Evaluation of Creative Writing

Evaluating creative writing generated by large language models (LLMs) remains challenging because open-ended narratives lack ground truths. Without performant automated evaluation methods, off-the-shelf (OTS) language models are employed as zero-shot judges, yet their reliability is unclear in this context. In pursuit of robust evaluation for creative writing, we introduce LitBench, the first standardized benchmark and paired dataset for creative writing verification, comprising a held-out test set of 2,480 debiased, human-labeled story comparisons drawn from Reddit and a 43,827-pair training corpus of human preference labels. Using LitBench, we (i) benchmark zero-shot LLM judges, (ii) train Bradley Terry and generative reward models, and (iii) conduct an online human study to validate reward model rankings on newly LLM-generated stories. Our benchmark identifies Claude-3.7-Sonnet as the strongest off-the-shelf judge, reaching 73% agreement with human preferences; among trained reward models, Bradley-Terry and Generative reward models both attain an accuracy of 78%, outperforming all off-the-shelf judges. An online human study further confirms that our trained reward models consistently align with human preferences in novel LLM-generated stories. We release LitBench and reward models at https://huggingface.co/collections/SAA-Lab/litbench-68267b5da3aafe58f9e43461, providing a vetted resource for reliable, automated evaluation and optimization of creative writing systems.

  • 6 authors
·
Jul 1, 2025 2

BBox DocVQA: A Large Scale Bounding Box Grounded Dataset for Enhancing Reasoning in Document Visual Question Answer

Document Visual Question Answering (DocVQA) is a fundamental task for multimodal document understanding and a key testbed for vision language reasoning. However, most existing DocVQA datasets are limited to the page level and lack fine grained spatial grounding, constraining the interpretability and reasoning capability of Vision Language Models (VLMs). To address this gap, we introduce BBox DocVQA a large scale, bounding box grounded dataset designed to enhance spatial reasoning and evidence localization in visual documents. We further present an automated construction pipeline, Segment Judge and Generate, which integrates a segment model for region segmentation, a VLM for semantic judgment, and another advanced VLM for question answer generation, followed by human verification for quality assurance. The resulting dataset contains 3.6 K diverse documents and 32 K QA pairs, encompassing single and multi region as well as single and multi page scenarios. Each QA instance is grounded on explicit bounding boxes, enabling fine grained evaluation of spatial semantic alignment. Benchmarking multiple state of the art VLMs (e.g., GPT 5, Qwen2.5 VL, and InternVL) on BBox DocVQA reveals persistent challenges in spatial grounding and reasoning accuracy. Furthermore, fine tuning on BBox DocVQA substantially improves both bounding box localization and answer generation, validating its effectiveness for enhancing the reasoning ability of VLMs. Our dataset and code will be publicly released to advance research on interpretable and spatially grounded vision language reasoning.

  • 8 authors
·
Nov 18, 2025

Potential and Perils of Large Language Models as Judges of Unstructured Textual Data

Rapid advancements in large language models have unlocked remarkable capabilities when it comes to processing and summarizing unstructured text data. This has implications for the analysis of rich, open-ended datasets, such as survey responses, where LLMs hold the promise of efficiently distilling key themes and sentiments. However, as organizations increasingly turn to these powerful AI systems to make sense of textual feedback, a critical question arises, can we trust LLMs to accurately represent the perspectives contained within these text based datasets? While LLMs excel at generating human-like summaries, there is a risk that their outputs may inadvertently diverge from the true substance of the original responses. Discrepancies between the LLM-generated outputs and the actual themes present in the data could lead to flawed decision-making, with far-reaching consequences for organizations. This research investigates the effectiveness of LLMs as judge models to evaluate the thematic alignment of summaries generated by other LLMs. We utilized an Anthropic Claude model to generate thematic summaries from open-ended survey responses, with Amazon's Titan Express, Nova Pro, and Meta's Llama serving as LLM judges. The LLM-as-judge approach was compared to human evaluations using Cohen's kappa, Spearman's rho, and Krippendorff's alpha, validating a scalable alternative to traditional human centric evaluation methods. Our findings reveal that while LLMs as judges offer a scalable solution comparable to human raters, humans may still excel at detecting subtle, context-specific nuances. This research contributes to the growing body of knowledge on AI assisted text analysis. We discuss limitations and provide recommendations for future research, emphasizing the need for careful consideration when generalizing LLM judge models across various contexts and use cases.

  • 10 authors
·
Jan 14, 2025 2

Flex-Judge: Think Once, Judge Anywhere

Human-generated reward signals are critical for aligning generative models with human preferences, guiding both training and inference-time evaluations. While large language models (LLMs) employed as proxy evaluators, i.e., LLM-as-a-Judge, significantly reduce the costs associated with manual annotations, they typically require extensive modality-specific training data and fail to generalize well across diverse multimodal tasks. In this paper, we propose Flex-Judge, a reasoning-guided multimodal judge model that leverages minimal textual reasoning data to robustly generalize across multiple modalities and evaluation formats. Our core intuition is that structured textual reasoning explanations inherently encode generalizable decision-making patterns, enabling an effective transfer to multimodal judgments, e.g., with images or videos. Empirical results demonstrate that Flex-Judge, despite being trained on significantly fewer text data, achieves competitive or superior performance compared to state-of-the-art commercial APIs and extensively trained multimodal evaluators. Notably, Flex-Judge presents broad impact in modalities like molecule, where comprehensive evaluation benchmarks are scarce, underscoring its practical value in resource-constrained domains. Our framework highlights reasoning-based text supervision as a powerful, cost-effective alternative to traditional annotation-intensive approaches, substantially advancing scalable multimodal model-as-a-judge.

  • 4 authors
·
May 24, 2025 2

Benchmarks Saturate When The Model Gets Smarter Than The Judge

Benchmarks are important tools to track progress in the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet inaccuracies in datasets and evaluation methods consistently undermine their effectiveness. Here, we present Omni-MATH-2, a manually revised version of the Omni-MATH dataset comprising a clean, exact-answer subset (n{=}4181) and a tagged, non-standard subset (n{=}247). Each problem was audited to ensure LaTeX compilability, solvability and verifiability, which involved adding missing figures or information, labeling problems requiring a proof, estimation or image, and removing clutter. This process significantly reduces dataset-induced noise, thereby providing a more precise assessment of model performance. The annotated dataset also allows us to evaluate judge-induced noise by comparing GPT-5 mini with the original Omni-Judge, revealing substantial discrepancies between judges on both the clean and tagged problem subsets. Expert annotations reveal that Omni-Judge is wrong in 96.4% of the judge disagreements, indicating its inability to differentiate between models' abilities, even well before saturation of the benchmark occurs. As problems become more challenging, we find that increasingly competent judges become essential in order to prevent judge errors from masking genuine differences between models. Finally, neither judge identifies the present failure modes for the subset of tagged problems, demonstrating that dataset quality and judge reliability are both critical to develop accurate benchmarks of model performance.

  • 4 authors
·
Jan 27 3

J1: Exploring Simple Test-Time Scaling for LLM-as-a-Judge

The current focus of AI research is shifting from emphasizing model training towards enhancing evaluation quality, a transition that is crucial for driving further advancements in AI systems. Traditional evaluation methods typically rely on reward models assigning scalar preference scores to outputs. Although effective, such approaches lack interpretability, leaving users often uncertain about why a reward model rates a particular response as high or low. The advent of LLM-as-a-Judge provides a more scalable and interpretable method of supervision, offering insights into the decision-making process. Moreover, with the emergence of large reasoning models, which consume more tokens for deeper thinking and answer refinement, scaling test-time computation in the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm presents an avenue for further boosting performance and providing more interpretability through reasoning traces. In this paper, we introduce J1-7B, which is first supervised fine-tuned on reflection-enhanced datasets collected via rejection-sampling and subsequently trained using Reinforcement Learning (RL) with verifiable rewards. At inference time, we apply Simple Test-Time Scaling (STTS) strategies for additional performance improvement. Experimental results demonstrate that J1-7B surpasses the previous state-of-the-art LLM-as-a-Judge by 4.8\% and exhibits a 5.1\% stronger scaling trend under STTS. Additionally, we present three key findings: (1) Existing LLM-as-a-Judge does not inherently exhibit such scaling trend. (2) Model simply fine-tuned on reflection-enhanced datasets continues to demonstrate similarly weak scaling behavior. (3) Significant scaling trend emerges primarily during the RL phase, suggesting that effective STTS capability is acquired predominantly through RL training.

  • 10 authors
·
May 17, 2025

From Rankings to Insights: Evaluation Should Shift Focus from Leaderboard to Feedback

Automatic evaluation benchmarks such as MT-Bench, Arena-Hard, and Auto-Arena are seeing growing adoption for the evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing research has primarily focused on approximating human-based model rankings using limited data and LLM-as-a-Judge. However, the fundamental premise of these studies, which attempts to replicate human rankings, is flawed. Specifically, these benchmarks typically offer only overall scores, limiting their utility to leaderboard rankings, rather than providing feedback that can guide model optimization and support model profiling. Therefore, we advocate for an evaluation paradigm shift from approximating human-based model rankings to providing feedback with analytical value. To this end, we introduce Feedbacker, an evaluation framework that provides comprehensive and fine-grained results, thereby enabling thorough identification of a model's specific strengths and weaknesses. Such feedback not only supports the targeted optimization of the model but also enhances the understanding of its behavior. Feedbacker comprises three key components: an extensible tree-based query taxonomy builder, an automated query synthesis scheme, and a suite of visualization and analysis tools. Furthermore, we propose a novel LLM-as-a-Judge method: PC2 (Pre-Comparison-derived Criteria) pointwise evaluation. This method derives evaluation criteria by pre-comparing the differences between several auxiliary responses, achieving the accuracy of pairwise evaluation while maintaining the time complexity of pointwise evaluation. Finally, leveraging the evaluation results of 17 mainstream LLMs, we demonstrate the usage of Feedbacker and highlight its effectiveness and potential. Our homepage project is available at https://liudan193.github.io/Feedbacker.

  • 6 authors
·
May 10, 2025

JudgeLM: Fine-tuned Large Language Models are Scalable Judges

Evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) in open-ended scenarios is challenging because existing benchmarks and metrics can not measure them comprehensively. To address this problem, we propose to fine-tune LLMs as scalable judges (JudgeLM) to evaluate LLMs efficiently and effectively in open-ended benchmarks. We first propose a comprehensive, large-scale, high-quality dataset containing task seeds, LLMs-generated answers, and GPT-4-generated judgments for fine-tuning high-performance judges, as well as a new benchmark for evaluating the judges. We train JudgeLM at different scales from 7B, 13B, to 33B parameters, and conduct a systematic analysis of its capabilities and behaviors. We then analyze the key biases in fine-tuning LLM as a judge and consider them as position bias, knowledge bias, and format bias. To address these issues, JudgeLM introduces a bag of techniques including swap augmentation, reference support, and reference drop, which clearly enhance the judge's performance. JudgeLM obtains the state-of-the-art judge performance on both the existing PandaLM benchmark and our proposed new benchmark. Our JudgeLM is efficient and the JudgeLM-7B only needs 3 minutes to judge 5K samples with 8 A100 GPUs. JudgeLM obtains high agreement with the teacher judge, achieving an agreement exceeding 90% that even surpasses human-to-human agreement. JudgeLM also demonstrates extended capabilities in being judges of the single answer, multimodal models, multiple answers, and multi-turn chat.

  • 3 authors
·
Oct 26, 2023 6

CodeJudgeBench: Benchmarking LLM-as-a-Judge for Coding Tasks

Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly advanced the state-of-the-art in various coding tasks. Beyond directly answering user queries, LLMs can also serve as judges, assessing and comparing the quality of responses generated by other models. Such an evaluation capability is crucial both for benchmarking different LLMs and for improving response quality through response ranking. However, despite the growing adoption of the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm, its effectiveness in coding scenarios remains underexplored due to the absence of dedicated benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce CodeJudgeBench, a benchmark explicitly designed to evaluate the performance of LLM-as-a-Judge models across three critical coding tasks: code generation, code repair, and unit test generation. Through comprehensive benchmarking of 26 LLM-as-a-Judge models, we find that recent thinking models significantly outperform non-thinking models on our carefully designed code judging tasks. Notably, even relatively small thinking models, such as Qwen3-8B, can outperform specially trained LLM-as-a-Judge models up to 70B in size. Nevertheless, all models still exhibit significant randomness in their judgment of coding tasks. For pairwise judging tasks, simply changing the order in which responses are presented can substantially impact accuracy. In addition, when judging code and unit tests written by different LLMs, LLM-as-a-Judge models also show variance in performance. This sensitivity raises concerns about the reliability and consistency of LLM-as-a-Judge in coding scenarios. Lastly, we study optimal prompting strategies for LLM-as-a-Judge. We find that using pair-wise comparison outperforms scalar point-wise judging. Furthermore, retaining comments and reasoning in the full, unprocessed LLM response leads to improved judge performance.

  • 5 authors
·
Jul 14, 2025

BERT-as-a-Judge: A Robust Alternative to Lexical Methods for Efficient Reference-Based LLM Evaluation

Accurate evaluation is central to the large language model (LLM) ecosystem, guiding model selection and downstream adoption across diverse use cases. In practice, however, evaluating generative outputs typically relies on rigid lexical methods to extract and assess answers, which can conflate a model's true problem-solving ability with its compliance with predefined formatting guidelines. While recent LLM-as-a-Judge approaches mitigate this issue by assessing semantic correctness rather than strict structural conformity, they also introduce substantial computational overhead, making evaluation costly. In this work, we first systematically investigate the limitations of lexical evaluation through a large-scale empirical study spanning 36 models and 15 downstream tasks, demonstrating that such methods correlate poorly with human judgments. To address this limitation, we introduce BERT-as-a-Judge, an encoder-driven approach for assessing answer correctness in reference-based generative settings, robust to variations in output phrasing, and requiring only lightweight training on synthetically annotated question-candidate-reference triplets. We show that it consistently outperforms the lexical baseline while matching the performance of much larger LLM judges, providing a compelling tradeoff between the two and enabling reliable, scalable evaluation. Finally, through extensive experimentation, we provide detailed insights into BERT-as-a-Judge's performance to offer practical guidance for practitioners, and release all project artifacts to foster downstream adoption.

artefactory Artefact
·
Apr 9 3

Helpful Agent Meets Deceptive Judge: Understanding Vulnerabilities in Agentic Workflows

Agentic workflows -- where multiple large language model (LLM) instances interact to solve tasks -- are increasingly built on feedback mechanisms, where one model evaluates and critiques another. Despite the promise of feedback-driven improvement, the stability of agentic workflows rests on the reliability of the judge. However, judges may hallucinate information, exhibit bias, or act adversarially -- introducing critical vulnerabilities into the workflow. In this work, we present a systematic analysis of agentic workflows under deceptive or misleading feedback. We introduce a two-dimensional framework for analyzing judge behavior, along axes of intent (from constructive to malicious) and knowledge (from parametric-only to retrieval-augmented systems). Using this taxonomy, we construct a suite of judge behaviors and develop WAFER-QA, a new benchmark with critiques grounded in retrieved web evidence to evaluate robustness of agentic workflows against factually supported adversarial feedback. We reveal that even strongest agents are vulnerable to persuasive yet flawed critiques -- often switching correct answers after a single round of misleading feedback. Taking a step further, we study how model predictions evolve over multiple rounds of interaction, revealing distinct behavioral patterns between reasoning and non-reasoning models. Our findings highlight fundamental vulnerabilities in feedback-based workflows and offer guidance for building more robust agentic systems.

  • 5 authors
·
Jun 3, 2025

Multi-Agent LLM Judge: automatic personalized LLM judge design for evaluating natural language generation applications

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across diverse domains, yet they still encounter challenges such as insufficient domain-specific knowledge, biases, and hallucinations. This underscores the need for robust evaluation methodologies to accurately assess LLM-based applications. Traditional evaluation methods, which rely on word overlap or text embeddings, are inadequate for capturing the nuanced semantic information necessary to evaluate dynamic, open-ended text generation. Recent research has explored leveraging LLMs to mimic human reasoning and decision-making processes for evaluation purposes known as LLM-as-a-judge framework. However, these existing frameworks have two significant limitations. First, they lack the flexibility to adapt to different text styles, including various answer and ground truth styles, thereby reducing their generalization performance. Second, the evaluation scores produced by these frameworks are often skewed and hard to interpret, showing a low correlation with human judgment. To address these challenges, we propose a novel dynamic multi-agent system that automatically designs personalized LLM judges for various natural language generation applications. This system iteratively refines evaluation prompts and balances the trade-off between the adaptive requirements of downstream tasks and the alignment with human perception. Our experimental results show that the proposed multi-agent LLM Judge framework not only enhances evaluation accuracy compared to existing methods but also produces evaluation scores that better align with human perception.

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 1, 2025

Are We on the Right Way to Assessing LLM-as-a-Judge?

LLM-as-a-Judge has been widely adopted as an evaluation method and served as supervised rewards in model training. However, existing benchmarks for LLM-as-a-Judge are mainly relying on human-annotated ground truth, which introduces human bias that undermines the assessment of reliability and imposes scalability constraints. To overcome these limitations, we introduce Sage, a novel evaluation suite that assesses the quality of LLM judges without necessitating any human annotation. Inspired by axioms of rational choice theory, Sage introduces two new lenses for measuring LLM-as-a-Judge: local self-consistency (pair-wise preference stability) and global logical consistency (transitivity across a full set of preferences). We curate a dataset of 650 questions by combining structured benchmark problems with real-world user queries. Our experiments demonstrate both the stability of our metrics and their high correlation with supervised benchmarks like LLMBar and RewardBench2, confirming Sage's reliability as an evaluation suite for the robustness and accuracy of LLM-as-a-Judge. Based on Sage, we reveal that current state-of-the-art LLMs exhibit significant reliability problems when acting as judges in both scoring and pairwise settings; even the top-performing models, Gemini-2.5-Pro and GPT-5, fail to maintain consistent preferences in nearly a quarter of difficult cases. We attribute this to a new phenomenon called situational preference, which explains why explicit rubrics or criteria can help the model judge consistently across answer pairs. Our further analysis shows that finetuned LLM-as-a-Judge is a feasible method to boost performance, and the panel-based judge as well as deep reasoning can enhance the judging consistency. We also find substantial inconsistency in human judgments, which indicates that human annotation may not be a reliable gold standard.

ONE-Lab ONE Lab
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Dec 17, 2025 2

Rethinking LLM-as-a-Judge: Representation-as-a-Judge with Small Language Models via Semantic Capacity Asymmetry

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used as reference-free evaluators via prompting, but this "LLM-as-a-Judge" paradigm is costly, opaque, and sensitive to prompt design. In this work, we investigate whether smaller models can serve as efficient evaluators by leveraging internal representations instead of surface generation. We uncover a consistent empirical pattern: small LMs, despite with weak generative ability, encode rich evaluative signals in their hidden states. This motivates us to propose the Semantic Capacity Asymmetry Hypothesis: evaluation requires significantly less semantic capacity than generation and can be grounded in intermediate representations, suggesting that evaluation does not necessarily need to rely on large-scale generative models but can instead leverage latent features from smaller ones. Our findings motivate a paradigm shift from LLM-as-a-Judge to Representation-as-a-Judge, a decoding-free evaluation strategy that probes internal model structure rather than relying on prompted output. We instantiate this paradigm through INSPECTOR, a probing-based framework that predicts aspect-level evaluation scores from small model representations. Experiments on reasoning benchmarks (GSM8K, MATH, GPQA) show that INSPECTOR substantially outperforms prompting-based small LMs and closely approximates full LLM judges, while offering a more efficient, reliable, and interpretable alternative for scalable evaluation.

  • 11 authors
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Jan 30 2

No Free Labels: Limitations of LLM-as-a-Judge Without Human Grounding

LLM-as-a-Judge is a framework that uses an LLM (large language model) to evaluate the quality of natural language text - typically text that is also generated by an LLM. This framework holds great promise due to its relative low-cost, ease of use, and strong correlations with human stylistic preferences. However, LLM Judges have been shown to exhibit biases that can distort their judgments. We evaluate how well LLM Judges can grade whether a given response to a conversational question is correct, an ability crucial to soundly estimating the overall response quality. To do so, we create and publicly release a human-annotated dataset with labels of correctness for 1,200 LLM responses. We source questions from a combination of existing datasets and a novel, challenging benchmark (BFF-Bench) created for this analysis. We demonstrate a strong connection between an LLM's ability to correctly answer a question and grade responses to that question. Although aggregate level statistics might imply a judge has high agreement with human annotators, it will struggle on the subset of questions it could not answer. To address this issue, we recommend a simple solution: provide the judge with a correct, human-written reference answer. We perform an in-depth analysis on how reference quality can affect the performance of an LLM Judge. We show that providing a weaker judge (e.g. Qwen 2.5 7B) with higher quality references reaches better agreement with human annotators than a stronger judge (e.g. GPT-4o) with synthetic references.

  • 5 authors
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Mar 6, 2025

On scalable oversight with weak LLMs judging strong LLMs

Scalable oversight protocols aim to enable humans to accurately supervise superhuman AI. In this paper we study debate, where two AI's compete to convince a judge; consultancy, where a single AI tries to convince a judge that asks questions; and compare to a baseline of direct question-answering, where the judge just answers outright without the AI. We use large language models (LLMs) as both AI agents and as stand-ins for human judges, taking the judge models to be weaker than agent models. We benchmark on a diverse range of asymmetries between judges and agents, extending previous work on a single extractive QA task with information asymmetry, to also include mathematics, coding, logic and multimodal reasoning asymmetries. We find that debate outperforms consultancy across all tasks when the consultant is randomly assigned to argue for the correct/incorrect answer. Comparing debate to direct question answering, the results depend on the type of task: in extractive QA tasks with information asymmetry debate outperforms direct question answering, but in other tasks without information asymmetry the results are mixed. Previous work assigned debaters/consultants an answer to argue for. When we allow them to instead choose which answer to argue for, we find judges are less frequently convinced by the wrong answer in debate than in consultancy. Further, we find that stronger debater models increase judge accuracy, though more modestly than in previous studies.

  • 11 authors
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Jul 5, 2024 1

GenEval 2: Addressing Benchmark Drift in Text-to-Image Evaluation

Automating Text-to-Image (T2I) model evaluation is challenging; a judge model must be used to score correctness, and test prompts must be selected to be challenging for current T2I models but not the judge. We argue that satisfying these constraints can lead to benchmark drift over time, where the static benchmark judges fail to keep up with newer model capabilities. We show that benchmark drift is a significant problem for GenEval, one of the most popular T2I benchmarks. Although GenEval was well-aligned with human judgment at the time of its release, it has drifted far from human judgment over time -- resulting in an absolute error of as much as 17.7% for current models. This level of drift strongly suggests that GenEval has been saturated for some time, as we verify via a large-scale human study. To help fill this benchmarking gap, we introduce a new benchmark, GenEval 2, with improved coverage of primitive visual concepts and higher degrees of compositionality, which we show is more challenging for current models. We also introduce Soft-TIFA, an evaluation method for GenEval 2 that combines judgments for visual primitives, which we show is more well-aligned with human judgment and argue is less likely to drift from human-alignment over time (as compared to more holistic judges such as VQAScore). Although we hope GenEval 2 will provide a strong benchmark for many years, avoiding benchmark drift is far from guaranteed and our work, more generally, highlights the importance of continual audits and improvement for T2I and related automated model evaluation benchmarks.

  • 6 authors
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Dec 18, 2025