Language Model Generation Evaluation

Overview

The field studies how to tell whether generated text is correct, useful, faithful to its sources, well written, and appropriate for a task. Approaches range from lexical and embedding-based metrics to human ratings, rubric-based LLM judges, learned evaluators, and task-specific checks such as code execution or schema validation. Benchmarks increasingly test long-form and open-ended outputs, multiple samples, languages, and settings, while evaluation-cost methods aim to select informative examples efficiently. A central challenge is that scores can depend on prompts, judges, and task context: a fluent or highly rated answer may still omit facts, repeat familiar ideas, or fail to reflect human preferences.

Latest papers

396 papers56 papers in the last four weeks, up 17% on the four weeks before. 0.3% of all new papers.

Mar 30, 2026

Atomic and Holistic LLM Judges for Reference-Grounded Support Labels: A Prompt-Controlled Comparison

When an LLM judge only has to assign a three-way support label to a candidate answer given a reference, does asking it to decompose the answer into atomic claims help, and at what cost? We compare four single-call designs that share the judge model, the inputs, and the level of instruction detail: candidate-side atomic decomposition, a matched holistic rubric, reference-side decomposition that checks whether each reference claim is covered, and a bidirectional combination. Support labels are constructed from TruthfulQA, ASQA, and QAMPARI references (200 questions and 400 rows per dataset). All four designs are run with Opus-4.6, GPT-4.1, and Gemini Flash Lite; Sonnet-4.6 is added for the candidate-side and holistic designs. Candidate-side decomposition is weak where the label depends on completeness: the holistic rubric is more accurate on ASQA and QAMPARI for every judge while using fewer tokens. Reference-side decomposition is 12.5-21.3 points more accurate than holistic on ASQA for 28-29% more tokens, and stays near the holistic ceiling on QAMPARI at 63-69% more. On TruthfulQA misconceptions, candidate-side decomposition is competitive and significantly better for two judges. On a 60-row single-author subset whose labels are looser than strict reference completeness, candidate-side decomposition edges ahead of holistic for every judge, reversing the construction-label order. What a judge decomposes should follow what the label measures.
Mar 30, 2026

ViviDoc: Generating Interactive Documents through Human-Agent Collaboration

Interactive documents help readers engage with complex ideas through dynamic visualization, interactive animations, and exploratory interfaces. However, creating such documents remains costly, as it requires both domain expertise and web development skills. Recent Large Language Model (LLM)-based agents can automate content creation, but directly applying them to interactive document generation often produces outputs that are difficult to control. To address this, we present ViviDoc, to the best of our knowledge the first work to systematically address interactive document generation. ViviDoc introduces a multi-agent pipeline (Planner, Styler, Executor, Evaluator). To make the generation process controllable, we provide three levels of human control: (1) the Document Specification (DocSpec) with SRTC Interaction Specifications (State, Render, Transition, Constraint) for structured planning, (2) a content-aware Style Palette for customizing writing and interaction styles, and (3) chat-based editing for iterative refinement. We also construct ViviBench, a benchmark of 101 topics derived from real-world interactive documents across 11 domains, along with a taxonomy of 8 interaction types and a 4-dimensional automated evaluation framework validated against human ratings (Pearson r > 0.84). Experiments show that ViviDoc achieves the highest content richness and interaction quality in both automated and human evaluation. A 12-person user study confirms that the system is easy to use, provides effective control over the generation process, and produces documents that satisfy users.
Mar 27, 2026

When Perplexity Lies: Generation-Focused Distillation of Hybrid Sequence Models

Converting a pretrained Transformer into a more efficient hybrid model through distillation offers a promising approach to reducing inference costs. However, achieving high-quality generation in distilled models requires careful joint design of both the student architecture and the distillation process. Many prior distillation works evaluate downstream multiple-choice benchmarks by ranking candidate answers with log-likelihood rather than requiring autoregressive generation, which can obscure important differences in model quality. For example, on overlapping benchmarks, we show that a 7B distilled model that nearly matches its teacher to within 0.2 pp under log-likelihood scoring falls behind by 20.8 pp when it must generate answers autoregressively. We investigate this phenomenon with GenDistill, a multi-stage pipeline we designed for distilling a pretrained Transformer into an efficient Hybrid Kimi Delta Attention (Hybrid-KDA) student. Using it as a controlled testbed on Qwen3-0.6B, we systematically ablate six design axes (training objective, loss masking, training duration, dataset selection, parameter freezing, and architecture choice) and evaluate every choice under both log-likelihood and generation-based protocols. We find that log-likelihood-based evaluation consistently underestimates the gap between teacher and student, and can in some cases reverse the ranking of design choices, so conclusions drawn from perplexity-only evaluation may be misleading. Among the factors we study, dataset selection, completion-only masking, and freezing attention layers during post-training have the largest impact on generation quality. Our best distillation recipe, using a Hybrid-KDA model as the student, retains 86-90% of teacher accuracy on knowledge benchmarks while reducing KV cache memory by up to 75% and improving time-to-first-token by 2-4x at 128K-token contexts.
Mar 27, 2026

ALBA: A European Portuguese Benchmark for Evaluating Language and Linguistic Dimensions in Generative LLMs

As Large Language Models (LLMs) expand across multilingual domains, evaluating their performance in under-represented languages becomes increasingly important. European Portuguese (pt-PT) is particularly affected, as existing training data and benchmarks are mainly in Brazilian Portuguese (pt-BR). To address this, we introduce ALBA, a linguistically grounded benchmark designed from the ground up to assess LLM proficiency in linguistic-related tasks in pt-PT across eight linguistic dimensions, including Language Variety, Culture-bound Semantics, Discourse Analysis, Word Plays, Syntax, Morphology, Lexicology, and Phonetics and Phonology. ALBA is manually constructed by language experts and paired with an LLM-as-a-judge framework for scalable evaluation of pt-PT generated language. Experiments on a diverse set of models reveal performance variability across linguistic dimensions, highlighting the need for comprehensive, variety-sensitive benchmarks that support further development of tools in pt-PT.
Mar 25, 2026

Pingala: Prosody-Aware Decoding for Sanskrit Poetry Generation

Poetry generation in Sanskrit typically requires the verse to be semantically coherent and adhere to strict prosodic rules. In Sanskrit prosody, every line of a verse is typically a fixed length sequence of syllables adhering to prescribed binary patterns of syllable weights. We observe that instead of treating a verse as a monolithic sequence, segmenting them as grouped-lines leads to significant improvement in semantic coherence by 10% with comparable metrical adherence. Specifically, Pingala, our proposed decoding approach is designed to encourage every line to have well-formed words and our token selection biases the model towards it by preferring longer tokens. Writing in Sanskrit follows phonemic orthography, hence using a phonetically aware transliteration scheme, SLP1, increased the metrical alignment by 46% with comparable semantic similarity, for a instruction fine-tuned large language models like Phi-4. We also introduce a new approach for reference-free evaluation using cross-encoders which achieved better alignment with true poetry instances.
Mar 24, 2026

Decoding AI Authorship: Can LLMs Truly Mimic Human Style Across Literature and Politics?

Amidst the rising capabilities of generative AI to mimic specific human styles, this study investigates the ability of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs), including GPT-4o, Gemini 1.5 Pro, and Claude Sonnet 3.5, to emulate the authorial signatures of prominent literary and political figures: Walt Whitman, William Wordsworth, Donald Trump, and Barack Obama. Utilizing a zero-shot prompting framework with strict thematic alignment, we generated synthetic corpora evaluated through a complementary framework combining transformer-based classification (BERT) and interpretable machine learning (XGBoost). Our methodology integrates Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) markers, perplexity, and readability indices to assess the divergence between AI-generated and human-authored text. Results demonstrate that AI-generated mimicry remains highly detectable, with XGBoost models trained on a restricted set of eight stylometric features achieving accuracy comparable to high-dimensional neural classifiers. Feature importance analyses identify perplexity as the primary discriminative metric, revealing a significant divergence in the stochastic regularity of AI outputs compared to the higher variability of human writing. While LLMs exhibit distributional convergence with human authors on low-dimensional heuristic features, such as syntactic complexity and readability, they do not yet fully replicate the nuanced affective density and stylistic variance inherent in the human-authored corpus. By isolating the specific statistical gaps in current generative mimicry, this study provides a comprehensive benchmark for LLM stylistic behavior and offers critical insights for authorship attribution in the digital humanities and social media.
Mar 23, 2026

Generating and Evaluating Sustainable Procurement Criteria for the Swiss Public Sector using In-Context Prompting with Large Language Models

Public procurement refers to the process by which public sector institutions, such as governments, municipalities, and publicly funded bodies, acquire goods and services. Swiss law requires the integration of ecological, social, and economic sustainability requirements into tender evaluations in the format of criteria that have to be fulfilled by a bidder. However, translating high-level sustainability regulations into concrete, verifiable, and sector-specific procurement criteria (such as selection criteria, award criteria, and technical specifications) remains a labor-intensive and error-prone manual task, requiring substantial domain expertise in several groups of goods and services and considerable manual effort. This paper presents a configurable, LLM-assisted pipeline that is presented as a software supporting the systematic generation and evaluation of sustainability-oriented procurement criteria catalogs for Switzerland. The system integrates in-context prompting, interchangeable LLM backends, and automated output validation to enable auditable criteria generation across different procurement sectors. As a proof of concept, we instantiate the pipeline using official sustainability guidelines published by the Swiss government and the European Commission, which are ingested as structured reference documents. We evaluate the system through a combination of automated quality checks, including an LLM-based evaluation component, and expert comparison against a manually curated gold standard. Our results demonstrate that the proposed pipeline can substantially reduce manual drafting effort while producing criteria catalogs that are consistent with official guidelines. We further discuss system limitations, failure modes, and design trade-offs observed during deployment, highlighting key considerations for integrating generative AI into public sector software workflows.
Mar 23, 2026

Autoregressive vs. Masked Diffusion Language Models: A Controlled Comparison

We present a controlled empirical comparison between autoregressive (AR) and masked diffusion (MDLM) language models. Both models are trained on identical data (50M tokens from TinyStories), identical compute budget (20,000 steps, batch size 32, sequence length 512), and identical hardware (NVIDIA H100 80GB), isolating the generation paradigm as the sole variable. We report three findings. First, both paradigms achieve comparable training throughput (~50K tokens/second), with MDLM requiring only 4.7% more wall-clock time. Second, AR converges faster and begins overfitting by step 14,000, while MDLM converges more slowly and is still improving at step 20,000, suggesting different compute-optimal training regimes. Third, quantitative diversity analysis over 1,000 generated samples reveals a structural diversity-fluency trade-off: AR produces fluent but repetitive outputs (99.8% begin with the same word), while MDLM generates more diverse narratives (93.4% unique 5-word openings, higher Distinct-n, lower Self-BLEU), at the cost of occasional grammatical inconsistencies. All code, trained checkpoints, and data pipelines are released for reproducibility.
Mar 23, 2026

DATASHI: A Parallel English-Tashlhiyt Corpus for Orthography Normalization and Low-Resource Language Processing

DATASHI is a new parallel English-Tashlhiyt corpus that fills a critical gap in computational resources for Amazigh languages. It contains 5,000 sentence pairs, including a 1,500-sentence subset with expert-standardized and non-standard user-generated versions, enabling systematic study of orthographic diversity and normalization. This dual design supports text-based NLP tasks - such as tokenization, translation, and normalization - and also serves as a foundation for read-speech data collection and multimodal alignment. Comprehensive evaluations with state-of-the-art Large Language Models (GPT-5, Claude-Sonnet-4.5, Gemini-2.5-Pro, Mistral, Qwen3-Max) show clear improvements from zero-shot to few-shot prompting, with Gemini-2.5-Pro achieving the lowest word and character-level error rates and exhibiting robust cross-lingual generalization. A fine-grained analysis of edit operations - deletions, substitutions, and insertions - across phonological classes (geminates, emphatics, uvulars, and pharyngeals) further highlights model-specific sensitivities to marked Tashlhiyt features and provides new diagnostic insights for low-resource Amazigh orthography normalization.
Mar 22, 2026

LLM-Based Intelligent Notification Composition: From Static Personalization to Context-Aware Persuasive Messaging

Push notifications remain among the most direct channels through which digital platforms engage users, yet existing approaches have invested heavily in who to notify, when to notify, and what to recommend, while leaving how to communicate as the least-optimized stage. This paper argues that message quality is an independent, underinvested lever, and that LLMs create their most differentiated value precisely at this layer. We make three contributions. First, we define notification message quality along six dimensions (contextual relevance, clarity, actionability, novelty handling, linguistic freshness, and persuasive appropriateness) and show how LLM-based composition improves each relative to templates. Across reviewed deployments, reported improvements range from +8% to +14.5% CTR over static templates and +1% to +2.5% over mature slot-filling systems, though these span heterogeneous systems and should not be treated as directly comparable. Second, we provide an architectural attribution analysis disentangling message generation from adjacent components (targeting, ranking, timing), arguing that observed gains are frequently misattributed to text generation alone. Third, we introduce a three-criterion decision framework specifying when LLM generation is and is not the binding constraint. We support these arguments through a PRISMA-guided survey (28 sources from 142 screened), examine domain-specific applications across social media, food delivery, and e-commerce, and propose a unified architectural framework with budget-aware routing, grounded generation, candidate ranking, diversity controls, and online learning.
Mar 20, 2026

Semantic Delta: An Interpretable Signal Differentiating Human and LLMs Dialogue

Do LLMs talk like us? This question intrigues a multitude of scholar and it is relevant in many fields, from education to academia. This work presents an interpretable statistical feature for distinguishing human written and LLMs generated dialogue. We introduce a lightweight metric derived from semantic categories distribution. Using the Empath lexical analysis framework, each text is mapped to a set of thematic intensity scores. We define semantic delta as the difference between the two most dominant category intensities within a dialogue, hypothesizing that LLM outputs exhibit stronger thematic concentration than human discourse. To evaluate this hypothesis, conversational data were generated from multiple LLM configurations and compared against heterogeneous human corpora, including scripted dialogue, literary works, and online discussions. A Welch t-test was applied to the resulting distributions of semantic delta values. Results show that AI-generated texts consistently produce higher deltas than human texts, indicating a more rigid topics structure, whereas human dialogue displays a broader and more balanced semantic spread. Rather than replacing existing detection techniques, the proposed zero-shot metric provides a computationally inexpensive complementary signal that can be integrated into ensemble detection systems. These finding also contribute to the broader empirical understanding of LLM behavioural mimicry and suggest that thematic distribution constitutes a quantifiable dimension along which current models fall short of human conversational dynamics.
Mar 19, 2026

Evaluating 5W3H Structured Prompting for Intent Alignment in Human-AI Interaction

Natural language prompts often suffer from intent transmission loss: the gap between what users actually need and what they communicate to AI systems. We evaluate PPS (Prompt Protocol Specification), a 5W3H-based framework for structured intent representation in human-AI interaction. In a controlled three-condition study across 60 tasks in three domains (business, technical, and travel), three large language models (DeepSeek-V3, Qwen-Max, and Kimi), and three prompt conditions - (A) simple prompts, (B) raw PPS JSON, and (C) natural-language-rendered PPS - we collect 540 AI-generated outputs evaluated by an LLM judge. We introduce goal_alignment, a user-intent-centered evaluation dimension, and find that rendered PPS outperforms both simple prompts and raw JSON on this metric. PPS gains are task-dependent: gains are large in high-ambiguity business analysis tasks but reverse in low-ambiguity travel planning. We also identify a measurement asymmetry in standard LLM evaluation, where unconstrained prompts can inflate constraint adherence scores and mask the practical value of structured prompting. A preliminary retrospective survey (N = 20) further suggests a 66.1% reduction in follow-up prompts required, from 3.33 to 1.13 rounds. These findings suggest that structured intent representations can improve alignment and usability in human-AI interaction, especially in tasks where user intent is inherently ambiguous.
Mar 18, 2026

Modeling the human lexicon under temperature variations: linguistic factors, diversity and typicality in LLM word associations

Large language models (LLMs) achieve impressive results in terms of fluency in text generation, yet the nature of their linguistic knowledge - in particular the human-likeness of their internal lexicon - remains uncertain. This study compares human and LLM-generated word associations to evaluate how accurately models capture human lexical patterns. Using English cue-response pairs from the SWOW dataset and newly generated associations from three LLMs (Mistral-7B, Llama-3.1-8B, and Qwen-2.5-32B) across multiple temperature settings, we examine (i) the influence of lexical factors such as word frequency and concreteness on cue-response pairs, and (ii) the variability and typicality of LLM responses compared to human responses. Results show that all models mirror human trends for frequency and concreteness but differ in response variability and typicality. Larger models such as Qwen tend to emulate a single "prototypical" human participant, generating highly typical but minimally variable responses, while smaller models such as Mistral and Llama produce more variable yet less typical responses. Temperature settings further influence this trade-off, with higher values increasing variability but decreasing typicality. These findings highlight both the similarities and differences between human and LLM lexicons, emphasizing the need to account for model size and temperature when probing LLM lexical representations.
Mar 18, 2026

Text-to-Stage: Spatial Layouts from Long-form Narratives

In this work, we probe the ability of a language model to demonstrate spatial reasoning from unstructured text, mimicking human capabilities and automating a process that benefits many downstream media applications. Concretely, we study the narrative-to-play task: inferring stage-play layouts (scenes, speaker positions, movements, and room types) from text that lacks explicit spatial, positional, or relational cues. We then introduce a dramaturgy-inspired deterministic evaluation suite and, finally, a training and inference recipe that combines rejection SFT using Best-of-N sampling with RL from verifiable rewards via GRPO. Experiments on a text-only corpus of classical English literature demonstrate improvements over vanilla models across multiple metrics (character attribution, spatial plausibility, and movement economy), as well as alignment with an LLM-as-a-judge and subjective human preferences.
Mar 16, 2026

When Stability Fails: Hidden Failure Modes Of LLMS in Data-Constrained Scientific Decision-Making

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as decision-support tools in data-constrained scientific workflows, where correctness and validity are critical. However, evaluation practices often emphasize stability or reproducibility across repeated runs. While these properties are desirable, stability alone does not guar- antee agreement with statistical ground truth when such references are available. We introduce a controlled behavioral evaluation framework that explicitly sep- arates four dimensions of LLM decision-making: stability, correctness, prompt sensitivity, and output validity under fixed statistical inputs. We evaluate multi- ple LLMs using a statistical gene prioritization task derived from differential ex- pression analysis across prompt regimes involving strict and relaxed significance thresholds, borderline ranking scenarios, and minor wording variations. Our ex- periments show that LLMs can exhibit near-perfect run-to-run stability while sys- tematically diverging from statistical ground truth, over-selecting under relaxed thresholds, responding sharply to minor prompt wording changes, or producing syntactically plausible gene identifiers absent from the input table. Although sta- bility reflects robustness across repeated runs, it does not guarantee agreement with statistical ground truth in structured scientific decision tasks. These findings highlight the importance of explicit ground-truth validation and output validity checks when deploying LLMs in automated or semi-automated scientific work- flows.
Mar 16, 2026

Writer-R1: Dynamic Rubric Mining for Reinforcement Learning of Open-Ended Writing

Training models for open-ended writing requires diverse prompts and sufficiently precise specifications of response quality. Constructing such specifications at scale entails recovering task requirements, consolidating overlapping criteria, and defining observable differences between performance levels. We introduce Writer-R1, a writing training pipeline built around Inductive Rubric Generation (IRG), which integrates these operations into an automated rubric construction procedure. The pipeline expands an open writing corpus and uses the resulting prompt-specific rubrics throughout supervised training and reinforcement learning (RL). Each rubric is concatenated with the user request and also defines the reward criteria, making the requirements used for assessment available to the writer before generation. A compact model, RubricGen-4B, learns to supply rubrics for new requests. Writer-R1 improves WritingBench scores by 0.182 and 0.158 over the 4B and 8B backbones, respectively, with gains also on HelloBench. Training ablations favor IRG over direct rubric generation, and further analyses support rubric transfer and the robustness of writer improvements across evaluators. These results support using inductively mined rubrics as both generation guidance and reward specifications for open-ended writing.
Mar 15, 2026

Creative Convergence or Imitation? Genre-Specific Homogeneity in LLM-Generated Chinese Literature

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in narrative generation. However, they often produce structurally homogenized stories, frequently following repetitive arrangements and combinations of plot events along with stereotypical resolutions. In this paper, we propose a novel theoretical framework for analysis by incorporating Proppian narratology and narrative functions. This framework is used to analyze the composition of narrative texts generated by LLMs to uncover their underlying narrative logic. Taking Chinese web literature as our research focus, we extend Propp's narrative theory, defining 34 narrative functions suited to modern web narrative structures. We further construct a human-annotated corpus to support the analysis of narrative structures within LLM-generated text. Experiments reveal that the primary reasons for the singular narrative logic and severe homogenization in generated texts are that current LLMs are unable to correctly comprehend the meanings of narrative functions and instead adhere to rigid narrative generation paradigms.
Mar 11, 2026

The Chronicles of RiDiC: Generating Datasets with Controlled Popularity Distribution for Long-form Factuality Evaluation

We present a configurable pipeline for generating multilingual sets of entities with specified characteristics, such as domain, geographical location and popularity, using data from Wikipedia and Wikidata. These datasets are intended for evaluating the factuality of LLMs' long-form generation, thereby complementing evaluation based on short-form QA datasets. We present the RiDiC dataset as an example of this approach. RiDiC contains 3,000 entities from three domains -- rivers, natural disasters, and car models -- spanning different popularity tiers. Each entity is accompanied by its geographical location, English and Chinese names (if available) and relevant English and Chinese Wikipedia content, which is used to evaluate LLMs' responses. Generations about RiDiC entities were obtained from three LLMs in English and Chinese. These were then evaluated using a third-party factuality checker, which showed that entities from our dataset caused even frontier models to hallucinate. To facilitate the evaluation of LLMs' long-form factuality in multiple languages, the code, data, and generation/evaluation scripts have been released.
Mar 8, 2026

Generating Hierarchical JSON Representations of Scientific Sentences Using LLMs

This paper investigates whether structured representations can preserve the meaning of scientific sentences. To test this, a lightweight LLM is fine-tuned using a novel structural loss function to generate hierarchical JSON structures from sentences collected from scientific articles. These JSONs are then used by a generative model to reconstruct the original text. Comparing the original and reconstructed sentences using semantic and lexical similarity we show that hierarchical formats are capable of retaining information of scientific texts effectively.
Mar 6, 2026

Moral Mazes in the Era of LLMs

Navigating complex social situations is an integral part of corporate life, ranging from giving critical feedback without hurting morale to rejecting requests without alienating teammates. Although large language models (LLMs) are permeating the workplace, it is unclear how well they can navigate these norms. To investigate this question, we created HR Simulator, a game where users roleplay as an HR officer and write emails to tackle challenging workplace scenarios, evaluated with GPT-4o as a judge based on scenario-specific rubrics. We analyze over 600 human and LLM emails and find systematic differences in style: LLM emails are more formal and empathetic. Furthermore, humans underperform LLMs (e.g., 23.5% vs. 48-54% scenario pass rate), but human emails rewritten by LLMs can outperform both, which indicates a hybrid advantage. On the evaluation side, judges can exhibit differences in their email preferences: an analysis of 10 judge models reveals evidence for emergent tact, where weaker models prefer direct, blunt communication but stronger models prefer more subtle messages. Judges also agree with each other more as they scale, which hints at a convergence toward shared communicative norms that may differ from humans'. Overall, our results suggest LLMs could substantially reshape communication in the workplace if they are widely adopted in professional correspondence.
Mar 6, 2026

Building an Ensemble LLM Semantic Tagger for UN Security Council Resolutions

This paper introduces a new methodology for using LLM-based systems for accurate and efficient semantic tagging of UN Security Council resolutions. The main goal is to leverage LLM performance variability to build ensemble systems for data cleaning and semantic tagging tasks. We introduce two evaluation metrics: Content Preservation Ratio (CPR) and Tag Well-Formedness (TWF), in order to avoid hallucinations and unnecessary additions or omissions to the input text beyond the task requirement. These metrics allow the selection of the best output from multiple runs of several GPT models. GPT-4.1 achieved the highest metrics for both tasks (Cleaning: CPR 84.9% - Semantic Tagging: CPR 99.99% and TWF 99.92%). In terms of cost, smaller models, such as GPT-4.1-mini, achieved comparable performance to the best model in each task at only 20% of the cost. These metrics ultimately allowed the ensemble to select the optimal output (both cleaned and tagged content) for all the LLM models involved, across multiple runs. With this ensemble design and the use of metrics, we create a reliable LLM system for performing semantic tagging on challenging texts.
Mar 5, 2026

AI-Assisted Moot Courts: Simulating Justice-Specific Questioning in Oral Arguments

In oral arguments, judges probe attorneys with questions about the factual record, legal claims, and the strength of their arguments. To prepare for this questioning, both law schools and practicing attorneys rely on moot courts: practice simulations of appellate hearings. Leveraging a dataset of U.S. Supreme Court oral argument transcripts, we examine whether AI models can effectively simulate justice-specific questioning for moot court-style training. Evaluating oral argument simulation is challenging because there is no single correct question for any given turn. Instead, effective questioning should reflect a combination of desirable qualities, such as anticipating substantive legal issues, detecting logical weaknesses, and maintaining an appropriately adversarial tone. We introduce a two-layer evaluation framework that assesses both the realism and pedagogical usefulness of simulated questions using complementary proxy metrics. We construct and evaluate both prompt-based and agentic oral argument simulators. We find that simulated questions are often perceived as realistic by human annotators and achieve high recall of ground truth substantive legal issues. However, models still face substantial shortcomings, including low diversity in question types and sycophancy. Importantly, these shortcomings would remain undetected under naive evaluation approaches.
Mar 4, 2026

The Arrival of AGI? When Expert Personas Exceed Expert Benchmarks

Do expert personas improve language model performance? The Wharton Generative AI Lab reports that they do not, broadcasting to millions via social media the recommendation that practitioners abandon a technique recommended by Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. We demonstrate that this null finding was structurally predictable. Five core mechanisms precluded detection before data collection began: baseline contamination elevating the starting point to near-ceiling, system prompt hierarchy subordinating experimental manipulation, impossible expert specifications collapsing to generic competence, format constraints suppressing reasoning processes, and provider exclusion limiting generalizability. Controlled trials correcting these limitations reveal what the original design obscured. To test this, we selected the GPQA Diamond hardest questions to prevent baseline pattern matching, forcing reliance on genuine expert reasoning. On items with valid key answers, expert personas achieve ceiling accuracy. They eliminated all baseline errors through confidence amplification. Furthermore, forensic examination of model divergence identified that half of the hardest GPQA items contain chemically or logically indefensible answers. The model's CoT revealed reasoning away from impossible answers, yielding penalization for accurate chemistry. These findings recontextualize the original null results. Methodologically sound persona research faces measurement constraints imposed by benchmark validity limitations. Answering the persona question requires evaluation infrastructure the field does not yet possess.
Mar 4, 2026

FINEST: Improving LLM Responses to Sensitive Topics Through Fine-Grained Evaluation

Large Language Models (LLMs) often generate overly cautious and vague responses on sensitive topics, sacrificing helpfulness for safety. Existing evaluation frameworks lack systematic methods to identify and address specific weaknesses in responses to sensitive topics, making it difficult to improve both safety and helpfulness simultaneously. To address this, we introduce FINEST, a FINE-grained response evaluation taxonomy for Sensitive Topics, which breaks down helpfulness and harmlessness into errors across three main categories: Content, Logic, and Appropriateness. Experiments on a Korean-sensitive question dataset demonstrate that our score- and error-based improvement pipeline, guided by FINEST, significantly improves the model responses across all three categories, outperforming refinement without guidance. Notably, score-based improvement -- providing category-specific scores and justifications -- yields the most significant gains, reducing the error sentence ratio for Appropriateness by up to 33.09%. This work lays the foundation for a more explainable and comprehensive evaluation and improvement of LLM responses to sensitive questions.
Mar 4, 2026

A Multi-Dimensional Quality Scoring Framework for Decentralized LLM Inference with Proof of Quality

Decentralized large language model (LLM) inference networks can pool heterogeneous compute to scale serving, but they require lightweight and incentive-compatible mechanisms to assess output quality. Prior work introduced cost-aware Proof of Quality (PoQ) and adaptive robust PoQ to allocate rewards under evaluator heterogeneity and adversarial behavior. In this paper, we focus on the quality signal itself and propose a multi-dimensional quality scoring framework that decomposes output quality into modular dimensions, including model and cost priors, structure quality, semantic quality, query-output alignment, and agreement/uncertainty. Using logged outputs from QA and summarization tasks, we systematically audit dimension reliability and show that seemingly reasonable dimensions can be task-dependent and even negatively correlated with reference quality without calibration. While the default composite underperforms a strong single semantic evaluator, ablations reveal that removing unreliable dimensions and re-normalizing weights yields a calibrated composite that matches or exceeds the best single- evaluator and consensus baselines. Finally, we integrate the composite score as a drop-in quality signal in PoQ and demonstrate complementary benefits with robust aggregation and adaptive trust weighting under adversarial evaluator attacks.
Mar 2, 2026

Markovian ODE-guided scoring can assess the quality of offline reasoning traces in language models

Reasoning traces produced by generative language models are increasingly used for tasks ranging from mathematical problem solving to automated fact checking. However, existing evaluation methods remain largely mechanical and fail to capture human-centric notions of reasoning quality in a way that generalizes across varied and progressively degraded reasoning. We introduce MarODE, an offline evaluation framework that assigns quality scores to reasoning traces. Its effectiveness is assessed using human-centric perturbations and human judgments, which jointly evaluate the fundamental dimensions of an evaluation metric - goodness and soundness. The approach is grounded in a Markovian formulation of reasoning progression and an ordinary differential equation based characterization of trace dynamics, enabling efficient evaluation of reasoning quality. In a large-scale evaluation, MarODE outperforms existing baselines by over 250% under Somers' D correlation. Our results emphasize the value of theory-driven evaluation frameworks as reasoning traces become central to language model-based systems.
Mar 1, 2026

CollabEval: Enhancing LLM-as-a-Judge via Multi-Agent Collaboration

Large Language Models (LLMs) have revolutionized AI-generated content evaluation, with the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm becoming increasingly popular. However, current single-LLM evaluation approaches face significant challenges, including inconsistent judgments and inherent biases from pre-training data. To address these limitations, we propose CollabEval, a novel multi-agent evaluation framework that implements a three-phase Collaborative Evaluation process: initial evaluation, multi-round discussion, and final judgment. Unlike existing approaches that rely on competitive debate or single-model evaluation, CollabEval emphasizes collaboration among multiple agents with strategic consensus checking for efficiency. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that CollabEval consistently outperforms single-LLM approaches across multiple dimensions while maintaining robust performance even when individual models struggle. The framework provides comprehensive support for various evaluation criteria while ensuring efficiency through its collaborative design.
Feb 28, 2026

RAVEL: Reasoning Agents for Validating and Evaluating LLM Text Synthesis

Large Language Models have evolved from single-round generators into long-horizon agents, capable of complex text synthesis scenarios. However, current evaluation frameworks lack the ability to assess the actual synthesis operations, such as outlining, drafting, and editing. Consequently, they fail to evaluate the actual and detailed capabilities of LLMs. To bridge this gap, we introduce RAVEL, an agentic framework that enables the LLM testers to autonomously plan and execute typical synthesis operations, including outlining, drafting, reviewing, and refining. Complementing this framework, we present C3EBench, a comprehensive benchmark comprising 1,258 samples derived from professional human writings. We utilize a "reverse-engineering" pipeline to isolate specific capabilities across four tasks: Cloze, Edit, Expand, and End-to-End. Through our analysis of 14 LLMs, we uncover that most LLMs struggle with tasks that demand contextual understanding under limited or under-specified instructions. By augmenting RAVEL with SOTA LLMs as operators, we find that such agentic text synthesis is dominated by the LLM's reasoning capability rather than raw generative capacity. Furthermore, we find that a strong reasoner can guide a weaker generator to yield higher-quality results, whereas the inverse does not hold. Our code and data are available at this link: https://github.com/ZhuoerFeng/RAVEL-Reasoning-Agents-Text-Eval.
Feb 27, 2026

How Large Language Models Get Stuck: Early structure with persistent errors

Linguistic insights may help make Large Language Model (LLM) training more efficient. We trained Meta's OPT model on the 100M word BabyLM dataset, and evaluated it on the BLiMP benchmark, which consists of 67 classes, each defined by sentence pairs that differ in a targeted syntactic or semantic rule violation. We tested the model's preference for grammatical over ungrammatical sentences across training iterations and grammatical types. In nearly one-third of the BLiMP classes, OPT fails to consistently assign a higher likelihood to grammatical sentences, even after extensive training. When it fails, it often establishes a clear (erroneous) separation of the likelihoods at an early stage of processing and sustains this to the end of our training phase. We hypothesize that this mis-categorization is costly because it creates entrenched biases that must, eventually, be reversed in order for the model to perform well. We probe this phenomenon using a mixture of qualitative (based on linguistic theory and the theory of Deep Learning) and quantitative (based on numerical testing) assessments. Our qualitative assessments indicate that only some BLiMP tests are meaningful guides. We conclude by articulating a hypothesis, the Bigram Hypothesis, which claims that the learning process will exhibit erroneous entrenchment if bigram statistics bias the model toward wrong distinctions early in training, and we describe a method of testing the hypothesis on appropriately selected BLiMP classes.
Feb 26, 2026

Generative Active Testing: Efficient LLM Evaluation via Proxy Task Adaptation

With the widespread adoption of pre-trained Large Language Models (LLM), there exists a high demand for task-specific test sets to benchmark their performance in domains such as healthcare and biomedicine. However, the cost of labeling test samples while developing new benchmarks poses a significant challenge, especially when expert annotators are required. Existing frameworks for active sample selection offer limited support for generative Question Answering tasks, where option dynamics can affect model decision boundaries. In this paper, we present Generative Active Testing (GAT), an uncertainty-aware acquisition framework leveraging LLMs as surrogates for informing the sample selection process. Using a novel Statement Adaptation Module, we modify generative tasks into a pseudo-classification format, enabling the capture of sample-level uncertainties across unlabeled candidates. Our zero-shot acquisition functions reduce estimation error by ~40% compared to traditional sampling baselines, offering a scalable solution for cost-effective model benchmarking.