Judgement

Generative artificial intelligence has reduced the cost of producing plausible symbolic artefacts, leading recent organisation scholarship to identify evaluation and discernment as constraints under conditions of production abundance. This perspective examines a further possibility: that machine evaluation itself becomes inexpensive enough to be deployed routinely and at scale. The investigation is prompted by Jev, TypeSafe AI's specialised model for typed probabilistic decisions. TypeSafe explicitly invokes William Stanley Jevons to argue that lower-cost machine intelligence can unlock previously uneconomic uses. Treating this as a technological provocation rather than an established empirical result, the article formulates a conditional Jevons hypothesis for machine evaluation: sufficiently large reductions in the total marginal cost of usable machine evaluation may increase its organisational consumption where latent demand is substantial and complementary costs do not dominate. The article integrates rebound economics with research on cheap prediction, production abundance, machine evaluation, decision allocation, authority, reliance and Executive Judgement to examine this possible scarcity transition. It distinguishes prediction, machine evaluation, organisational judgement and authorisation as functional activities whose costs need not fall together. Evaluations can share evidence, criteria and errors; scale mis-specified rubrics; operate on representations from which consequential qualifications have disappeared; and change practical decision rights through thresholds and exception routing. The resulting research problem is when cheap machine evaluation substitutes for human evaluative work, when it redistributes or creates demands for judgement, and how it affects the grounds available at consequential organisational commitment.

LLM judges are inherently subjective, often favoring different responses in pairwise comparison when neither option is objectively wrong. To study this subjectivity, we introduce JudgeProfile, a framework that dissects LLM evaluation into perception (how a judge compares two responses across specific attributes like clarity, correctness, and detail) and prioritization (how much each attribute influences the final choice). We curate SubjectiveSet, a dataset of 50,013 response pairs from 17 public data sources, evaluated by 21 LLM judges across 87 attributes. We find a hidden consensus in perception: judges frequently agree on attribute judgments even when their overall choices diverge. Building on this separation, we first characterize each judge's prioritization using attribute weights estimated from its own overall choices. These weights differ across judges even when estimated from the same attribute judgments. We then learn new weights from reference labels to adapt their decisions to a target evaluation standard. Reweighting perceived attributes improves average held-out agreement with reference labels from 66.48% to 71.97%, outperforming fine-tuning and rubric prompting. Our findings show that understanding and steering the subjectivity of LLM judges requires attention not only to what they perceive, but also to how they prioritize it.

Long-term memory lets an LLM assistant use a history it can no longer reread, and most memory systems build it by rewriting conversations into facts, graphs or typed memories at write time. We argue that the work of memory divides, as thinking does, into two systems. Most of it is fast System 1 work: many small, independent yes/no judgments about records, such as whether a record is needed or no longer current, which a decision model makes by the dozen in a third of a second. Only a little is slow System 2 work: writing a few search queries, naming what the reply needs and composing the answer, which an LLM does well but slowly. We present Mnemon, a memory agent built on this division. It keeps conversations as raw, dated records; an LLM (System 2) plans searches over them, a decision model, Jev (System 1), judges what the searches return, and rules with explicit budgets turn the judgments into a small View for an unchanged answering model. A background pass consolidates each record once into topic timelines, value histories and standing instructions linked to the records, so that questions about a whole conversation reach evidence their own searches miss. Because nothing is decided about a record when it is written, the same agent can read any store that returns dated records. With gpt-4.1-mini answering, as in a public re-evaluation of 14 systems, Mnemon scores 91.7% on LoCoMo, the highest among them, and 83.8% on LongMemEval-S, from under 4k tokens of context per question, with the lowest effective cost index on LoCoMo. With a reasoning model answering, it reaches 92.2% on LoCoMo and 94.4% on LongMemEval-S, the latter on par with the best published results. From 100K to 10M tokens of history on BEAM, its cost per question grows by a factor of 1.11. On the same records, Jev separates gold evidence better than two LLMs and is 3-11 times faster.

Screening a phone call for fraud needs a trustworthy probability after every caller turn, in milliseconds. Jev-style typed decisions promise exactly that: declared options go in, one calibrated probability per option comes out of a single forward pass, with no generated text. We test an open implementation of this readout, JevLite, on scam-call screening: Qwen3-4B is LoRA-tuned so that the temperature-scaled softmax over two answer-label logits is P(scam). On 41 held-out CallScreenBench scenarios (577 per-turn decisions) a three-seed ensemble reaches AUROC .974 with calibration error .052, non-inferior to an LLM judge (MiniMax-M3) at a pre-registered .02 margin, with no false alarms on legitimate calls, decisions 1.14 turns earlier under the same hang-up rule, and 64.5 ms per decision on one consumer GPU, 4.9x lower than the same backbone fine-tuned to generate its answer. The gain is in the readout and calibration, not accuracy: a fine-tuned ModernBERT encoder is not significantly worse, the recipe was selected with test-set exposure, and all callers are synthetic. We claim no architectural novelty; the contribution is the application and an evaluation reporting calibration, false alarms and decision timing alongside AUROC.

Hiring is bilateral: employers assess fit, while candidates present and defend evidence of their qualifications. Yet résumé screening, the first gate, is commonly automated as a static, one-call judgment over a résumé-job pair. We study a two-agent alternative in which employer-side and candidate-side agents represent these roles, exchange evidence, and update their judgments before deciding who advances. We compare procedures on 600 constructed résumé-job pairs using GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.7. Two-agent screening advances more applications (33.3% to 39.3% for GPT-5.5; 34.0% to 35.5% for Opus 4.7). Across three runs on the common 191-pair borderline pool, pass-instance rates rise from 4.5% to 26.2% and from 6.5% to 16.1%, respectively. This is not a uniform relaxation: two-agent screening rejects applications one-call advances, changing decisions in both directions. At similar pass volumes, the procedures advance different applications, and no one-call threshold recovers applications consistently selected by two-agent screening. Among discovery-selected cases re-executed in fresh runs, two-agent-only selections recur less often than shared selections, clearly under GPT-5.5 and less certainly under Opus 4.7, while a separate one-call follow-up shows no comparable decline. As hiring becomes agent-mediated on both sides, the screening procedure, not only the model behind it, shapes who reaches human review and how reliably that access recurs.

In collaborative tasks with asymmetric information, participants coordinate their understanding through interaction. We ask whether gaze provides evidence about grounding across two such tasks. Working from discrete behavioral annotations, we map HCRC MapTask (Anderson et al., 1991) and MUNDEX (Türk et al., 2023) into a shared partner/task/away vocabulary and compute gaze features around task-relevant dialogue units. In both corpora, aligned reference interpretations (MapTask) and UND (understood) judgments (MUNDEX) are associated with more task-directed gaze and with less partner-directed gaze, lower gaze entropy, and fewer gaze transitions. The associations are clearest for the participant leading the task: in giver-produced references, and in explainer judgments, which also co-vary with the explainee's gaze. In same-speaker MapTask reference chains, the speaker's gaze entropy is lower at the mention where a previously non-aligned referent becomes aligned. The best gaze feature groups improve modestly over controls under grouped cross-validation: temporal features in MapTask and raw proportions in MUNDEX. Because effects are small and several weaken when recurring participants rather than dialogues are the unit of inference, we treat gaze as one contributing cue to grounding, to be interpreted alongside task and dialogue context.

LLMs have been used to simulate human decision-making in professional settings, yet their behaviors in common-law jury trials remain unexplored. We study when and how a defendant's courtroom statement affects LLM-simulated jurors, focusing on persuasion, ideological bias, and background-based affinity. To support the analysis, we introduce JuryBench, a benchmark containing controversial criminal cases in U.S. criminal law. In each case, a defendant can claim various plausible justifications to support acquittal or reduced liability. We fix the base case and design defendants of different backgrounds, who give courtroom statements with varying emotional appeal or rebuttal. Jurors with diverse ideological profiles across the spectrum are simulated. We examine 20 frontier LLMs, resulting in a total of 432K decisions and rationales, and quantify changes in verdict severity. Our findings show that LLM-jury simulation echoes many human-jury findings. First, emotional persuasion can be detrimental, since jurors may perceive it as evidence of guilt or inconsistency. Next, we show that background fit between jurors and defendants is a stronger and significant factor than other isolated factors, and that jurors are in general harsher toward opposite-background defendants and lenient toward same-background ones. Finally, we find that juror ideology also strongly shapes severity judgments. These findings highlight both the promise and risks of using LLMs to model jury reasoning and call for careful evaluation. The data and code are available at https://github.com/choyingw/JuryBench

AI tools that help people judge online claims are usually evaluated while the tool is present. This paper asks a different question: after using such a tool, what can the user still do on their own? I call this epistemic transfer. It refers to the effect of prior AI-assisted verification on later unassisted performance on new claims. In this paper, I make three contributions. First, I distinguish epistemic transfer from nearby outcomes such as correction effects, trust, reliance, and human--AI team performance. Second, I introduce two simple quantities for studying it: the Epistemic Transfer Effect (ETE), which compares delayed unassisted performance across conditions, and Tool-Removal Cost (TRC), which measures the immediate drop in performance when the tool is taken away. Third, I turn these ideas into a practical evaluation protocol that can be used in online experiments or field studies. The protocol combines answer-first and evidence-first AI conditions with active-practice and no-practice controls, delayed tests on held-out claims, behavioral measures, and participant- and item-level analyses. Putting ETE and TRC together yields a diagnostic space that separates capability building, capability plus tool advantage, epistemic inertness or de-skilling, and verification on loan. The point is not that every AI tool must teach. The point is that when independent judgment matters, we should test not only whether a tool helps now, but also what it leaves behind.

Emotion-cause pair extraction in conversation (ECPEC) identifies utterance pairs in which one utterance causes an emotion expressed in another. Recent LLM-based approaches formulate ECPEC at markedly different granularities, ranging from generating complete pair sets to judging individual candidate pairs. In this paper, we make the surprising observation that task formulation substantially affects performance, where pair-level judgement outperforms dialogue-level generation in all 18 controlled comparisons. We investigate the sources of this paradigm gap and find that many relations omitted by dialogue-level generation remain recognizable under explicit pair queries, under which the model recognizes 92.7%-98.1% of emotion-cause relations. This suggests that LLMs can recognize emotion-cause relations but struggle to discover and return complete pair sets. Pair-level judgement alleviates this burden, although its candidate rankings are more reliable than the binary decisions produced by a shared threshold. Based on this diagnosis, we introduce an auxiliary retriever that selectively re-examines ambiguous boundary cases, yielding consistent F1 improvements of 0.50-1.46 points across three datasets while maintaining an inference time of only 1.49x that of the baseline paradigm. These findings show that task decomposition and candidate scope are critical to effectively utilizing LLMs for ECPEC.

AI coding agents often lose project-specific rationale across sessions and may repeat approaches that previously failed. The bottleneck is often not model capability but missing coding agent memory: a durable record of what was decided, tried, and ruled out. We present projectmem, an open-source, local-first memory and judgment layer for AI coding agents, which records development as an append-only, plain-text log of typed events (issues, attempts, fixes, decisions, and notes) and deterministically projects it into compact summaries served through the Model Context Protocol (MCP). When invoked before an edit, a file-scoped advisory precheck returns recorded failures, open issues, and churn for the target file, a design point we call Memory-as-Governance. We evaluate feasibility through an author-run, six-month self-study on two machines, a controlled latency benchmark, and client-compatibility tests. The study contains 3,228 unique events from 27 projects; 56% are issue-lifecycle events, and 86 of 427 distinct issues closed by a recorded fix had at least one failed attempt before the first fix in event-log order. These histories are candidates for later warnings, not evidence that warnings prevented failures. On a synthetic repository, the median analysis time for a 1,500-event log decreased from 42.0 seconds to 79.3 milliseconds, while git subprocesses per check decreased from 1,500 to two and the tested warning output was preserved. The results establish the feasibility of persistent project memory for AI coding agents and motivate a controlled repeat-failure benchmark for measuring whether coding-agent memory prevents repeated failures. Source code is available at https://github.com/riponcm/projectmem.

Overwhelmed courts in the United States review millions of default judgments each year. Unfortunately, such manual reviews are time-consuming and prone to error. In an audit of 188 debt collection cases granted default judgment by the Superior Court of Los Angeles, we find that 4% contained major defects that should have entirely prevented default judgment, 10% contained inconsistencies requiring reduced judgments, and 32% contained errors requiring amendment prior to judgment. To support courthouses in default judgment review, we collaborated with courthouse attorneys and judges in designing a Default Assistant. The Default Assistant employs large language models to evaluate a case with respect to predetermined legal requirements and provide cited recommendations for an expert user's review. We equip users to verify these recommendations by grounding the assistant's explanations in cited quotes and tables from the original case filings. We conduct a controlled study with 66 law students that conservatively simulates court review, with more time and resources than court staff. We nevertheless find users aided by the Default Assistant were 6.0% more accurate on the average requirement than unaided reviewers (p < 1.0e-4). Simultaneously, users were 25.9% faster in reviewing the average requirement than unaided reviewers (p < 2.5e-10). Statutory requirements demanding extensive document search realized the largest gains, with error reductions and time savings from AI assistance up to 62% and 34%, respectively, relative to unassisted user performance and with differences statistically significant (p < 0.05). Our work provides a proof-of-concept that AI assistants with citations have the potential to help resource-constrained courts conduct default judgment review more accurately and efficiently.

LLM-as-judge evaluation is widely used in benchmarking pipelines, where model outputs are compared and ranked using automated evaluators. These pipelines typically assume that judgments are stable properties of fixed inputs. We show that this assumption does not hold under interaction. We study post-decision manipulability: the extent to which an evaluation outcome can be altered through subsequent conversation with the judge after an initial decision has been made. Across controlled experiments on MT-Bench and AlpacaEval, we find that LLM judges are highly stable under repeated and neutral reevaluation, yet become substantially reversible under targeted post-decision challenge. An anti-baseline challenge protocol shows that stable judgments can be overturned through motivated interaction, while a counterbalanced target-validation protocol separates this reversibility from net target-directed steering. These reversals have practical consequences: they can degrade agreement with human preferences, shift benchmark rankings, and produce harmful evaluation changes despite high self-reported confidence. Authority framing is especially destabilizing, and revised judgments are often accompanied by low-overlap justifications, suggesting post hoc rationalization rather than reliable error correction. We introduce the Evaluation Robustness Score (ERS) to quantify interactional robustness by combining reversal susceptibility with counterbalanced directional effects. Our findings identify post-decision interaction as a distinct failure mode for LLM-as-judge evaluation and motivate evaluation protocols that measure not only static agreement, but robustness under challenge.

Legal NLP benchmarks are overwhelmingly English-centric, leaving failure modes in morphologically rich, non-Latin-script languages undetected. We introduce UA-Legal-Bench, a five-task benchmark for evaluating large language models on Ukrainian legal reasoning, built from the Unified State Register of Court Decisions (EDRSR) -- one of the world's largest open judicial corpora (99.5 million decisions). The benchmark comprises: (1) case-type classification (4 classes, n=2,000), (2) judgment form classification (4 classes, n=2,000), (3) case-outcome prediction (6 classes, n=800), (4) legal norm extraction (n=1,794), and (5) cause category prediction (22 classes, n=1,871). We evaluate 11 LLMs (3B--675B) from five families under zero-shot and 3-shot prompting via AWS Bedrock with 158K API calls. Our results reveal sharply task-dependent few-shot effects: few-shot prompting improves judgment form classification by up to +38.6 pp but has mixed effects on outcome prediction. We show that accuracy is misleading on imbalanced legal tasks: the model with highest COP accuracy (62%) is a majority-class predictor (macro-F1: 23%), while the genuinely best model scores only 44% macro-F1. Within-family scaling analysis reveals that 8B models can match frontier performance on surface-level tasks but scaling thresholds vary dramatically across families. We release all data, prompts, and model predictions.

Forensic vision-language models (VLMs) have recently been developed to detect image tampering and provide natural-language explanations. However, their robustness against adversarial manipulation remains underexplored. Existing adversarial attacks typically aim to flip the model's binary judgment, while the accompanying explanation may still reveal forensic cues and contradict the attacked judgment. In this paper, we study judgment-explanation consistent adversarial attacks against forensic VLMs and propose JECA^2, a controlled white-box red-team diagnostic that jointly redirects visual attribution and aligns textual explanations with the target judgment. On the visual side, JECA^2 uses Grad-CAM-guided perturbations to divert attribution from tampered regions toward benign regions. On the textual side, it optimizes prompt embeddings toward authenticity-affirming semantics under a token-proximity constraint. Experiments on forensic VLM benchmarks show that JECA^2 achieves higher attack success and automated judgment-explanation consistency than implemented baselines under white-box threat settings, while transfer to closed-source VLMs remains measurable but limited. Our results highlight a consistency failure mode in explanation-based forensic VLMs and motivate future robustness evaluation beyond binary detection accuracy.

Validating an LLM judge against human annotations usually means reporting several agreement statistics: accuracy, precision, recall, $F_1$, Cohen's $κ$, and one or more rank correlations. A survey of 24 recent LLM-as-judge papers finds metric choice entangled with the judgment scale, tie handling, invalid outputs, and abstention handling, and those choices rarely stated. For binary criteria -- the common case in rubric-based evaluation, where each criterion is graded MET or UNMET -- most of the reported numbers are redundant: Pearson's $r$, Spearman's $ρ$, Kendall's $τ_b$, the phi coefficient $φ$, and the Matthews Correlation Coefficient all reduce to a single number on non-degenerate binary data, so reporting several of them only creates an illusion of corroborating evidence. Cohen's $κ$ is the one agreement coefficient that adds information: it shares $φ$'s numerator but normalizes differently, and the gap between them measures how far the judge's positive-label rate has drifted from the human's. We then trace what changes when a judge may abstain with a CANNOT_ASSESS verdict: the three common ways of handling abstentions are not interchangeable preprocessing choices but answer different questions, and they break the binary equivalences. The same equivalences reappear, up to a negligible finite-sample correction, for multi-judge ensembles scored with Fleiss' $κ$ or Krippendorff's $α$. We close with a reporting checklist that names the judgment scale, the abstention and tie handling mode, coverage, the confusion matrix, and the aggregation level alongside any scalar agreement coefficient.

People use LLMs for reproductive-health questions, including abortion-related support. A response can sound supportive while answers reinforce harmful assumptions: judgment is likely, secrecy is safer, and support is limited. We introduce behavioral coherence evaluation, a design-time method that uses validation evidence from an established instrument to test relations among outputs. Using the Individual Level Abortion Stigma Scale, we prompted five LLMs to complete questionnaires for 627 personas and reviewed flagged patterns with five reproductive-health experts. Models scored personas lower on self-judgment but higher on worries about judgment; most made worries the highest-scoring dimension, although it was lowest in the ILAS reference sample. Four of five models reversed the reference direction by generating significantly higher worries about judgment scores for Black personas. Models defaulted to extreme secrecy after abortion despite varying stigma patterns across personas. Expert review showed that disclosure guidance requires context about relationship safety, legal risk, and trusted support.