LLM-as-a-Judge

Latest papers 362

Jul 12, 2026cs.CL

Eval-Pair Matrix: Answer-Paired Meta-Evaluation of LLM Judges for Grounded RAG

LLM-as-a-judge evaluation is widely used for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), but reusing the same model family as both generator and judge makes self-leniency difficult to identify. We introduce Eval-Pair Matrix, a controlled meta evaluation protocol for source-grounded RAG. Starting from GaRAGe questions and grounding passages, we induce one hidden answer-causal contradiction per record, generate answers from perturbed passages with GPT, Grok, and Gemini models, and then use the same models as blind judges to evaluate each answer against the original passages. The experiment contains 300 core records, 897 labeled generator outputs, and 2,683 judge verdicts in a crossed 3 x 3 matrix; the primary analysis uses 275 fully validated records. Instead of comparing diagonal and off-diagonal cells across different answers, we estimate same-model effects by pairing judges on the exact same candidate answer. This changes the interpretation: diagonal and off diagonal F1 are similar, and the paired same-model recall effect is near zero (-0.5 pp; 95% cluster bootstrap CI [-2.7, +1.7]). The only robust paired gap is lower matching-judge flagging for answers that avoided the induced claim (-4.3 pp). A targeted human evaluation finds that reviewed apparent false positives are alternate source-error detections, mistakes in labeling whether the induced claim was adopted, or unclear cases; none were adjudicated as genuine false alarms. The lesson is methodological: RAG judge studies should report full matrices, answer-paired effects, behavior strata, and label-task alignment.
Jul 12, 2026cs.CL

Articulate Intuition or Genuine Analysis? Benchmarking Epistemic Reliability in LLM-as-a-Judge Peer Reviews

When an LLM judge calls a peer review analytical and a human committee calls another review high quality, are they tracking the same thing? We argue they are not, and that the difference matters philosophically. We operationalise Kahneman's dual-process theory into a structured rubric for peer review and release Kahneman4Review, a benchmark of 3,563 rated reviews scored along nine theoretically motivated textual dimensions, eight bias diagnostics, and a continuous reasoning-quality score. Three findings bear on trustworthiness: decision tier is not detectably aligned with the rubric's text-grounded epistemic-quality proxy; public-showcase agentic reviews receive higher raw scores than pooled human reviews, but length and venue explain most of the gap and the samples are not paper-paired; and ICLR review-text diagnostics shift at the 2022--2023 transition, temporally coincident with widespread LLM availability but without identifying its cause. A matched function-probe pilot further shows that the rubric distinguishes textual probes designed to contrast genuine fault-finding with surface fluency. We argue that a trustworthy reliability benchmark for LLM judges must separate analytical form from epistemic function, and propose concrete design choices toward that goal. An interactive demo is available at https://huggingface.co/spaces/nuojohnchen/Kahneman4Review.
Jul 9, 2026cs.CL

Do You Need a Frontier Model as a Citation Verifier? Benchmarking Rubric LLMs for Deep-Research Source Attribution

Reinforcement learning increasingly relies on an LLM judge to score each rubric criterion, and that judge acts as the reward model during training. Before such a signal can be trusted, we need to know how capable the judge must be and how biased it is. We study this calibration question for citation quality in deep-research systems, where a search-grounded LLM must support each claim it writes with a cited source. Citation quality is a structured rubric task in which each attribution-citation pair is judged along two dimensions that require an LLM, source relevance and factual support. On an adversarial long-form benchmark, we score 8 off-the-shelf LLM judges from 3 model families against gold labels over 1,248 rubric decisions, all of which were human-reviewed and 378 of which were hard cases adjudicated from judge disagreements. Cheaper judges remain competitive across both dimensions, with GPT-5-mini attaining the strongest source-relevance pass-class F1 at 0.908 (κκ=0.636), while on factual support the judges are statistically indistinguishable (overlapping confidence intervals), so no single model dominates. At comparable F1, the judges still differ substantially in pass-rate drift, false positive rate, and false negative rate. Scalar F1 obscures this directional bias, yet it is exactly what a downstream reinforcement learning loop would reinforce. Calibrating the judge is therefore a prerequisite for using citation rubrics as reward signals, and our results show that this calibration does not require the most expensive available model.
Jul 9, 2026cs.CL

When the Judge Changes, So Does the Measurement: Auditing LLM-as-Judge Reliability

An LLM-as-judge score can move even when the candidate responses stay fixed, simply because the evaluator has changed. We treat this evaluator-replacement ambiguity as a measurement-validity problem. Across four judgment datasets, we compare two upgrade paths available in practice: scaling Qwen3 dense judges from 1.7B to 32B parameters and moving across MiniMax M2-M2.7 released APIs. The main pattern is that judge upgrades are not interchangeable: only Qwen3 1.7B to 4B gives a robust adjacent gain, while MiniMax adjacent releases do not. Stronger judges reduce but do not remove position and verbosity bias. Repeated-sample juries add little when errors are correlated. Structured debate can move decisions substantially, but without parser and fallback logs those shifts cannot be attributed to deliberation. We argue that LLM-as-judge reports should include dataset slices, bias probes, error-dependence estimates, and protocol audit trails.
Jul 9, 2026cs.AI

When LLMs Agree, Are They Right? Auditing Self-Consistency and Cross-Model Agreement as Confidence Signals

LLM-as-judge (Zheng et al., 2023) is increasingly the default for evaluating AI systems in enterprise pipelines, often scaled to ensembles (Verga et al., 2024) or "mixture-of-experts" (Shazeer et al., 2017) panels of judges. These systems share a key assumption: that consistency -- agreement among judges, or among a model's own samples -- indicates correctness. We show this assumption is unreliable. Agreement is not accuracy: a model can agree with itself, and different models can agree with each other, out of shared bias, a memorized heuristic, or an option-position prior rather than truth. We ask when agreement is nonetheless a usable proxy, in a large-scale cross-runner study: 53 runners drew K=50 samples for assigned overlapping cases across comparisons of model tier, prompting, and scale on GPQA Diamond and AIME -- 265,000 samples. Using majority-correctness as the deployment label and a hierarchical runner-clustered bootstrap, agreement is a positive but weak predictor (rho 0.20-0.59, all positive under item-clustered resampling) whose usefulness is regime-dependent: best for unsaturated mid-tier models and for allocating compute, and worst -- over-confident yet no more accurate -- for the most consistent frontier model (agreement >=0.8 on 77% of GPQA case-result entries, 48% of those wrong). An exploratory cross-family check on three Claude tiers shows the same frontier over-confidence, with confident errors recurring across providers above a marginal-preserving null. Self-consistency is thus a conditional proxy for correctness, not a standalone confidence score. We publicly release the de-identified per-run rows and answer distributions.
Jul 8, 2026cs.CL

A Reliability Assessment of LALM Audio Judges for Full-Duplex Voice Agents

We report the empirical reliability of Gemini models as audio judges that score full-duplex agent conversations directly from the raw stereo waveform, tested across three models in the Gemini family: 2.5 Flash, 3.5 Flash, and 3.1 Pro. Our primary evidence base uses Gemini 2.5 Flash as the ground-truth model, validated against three calibrated human raters on 209 stereo sessions, scored on 8 production dimensions: 152 full-duplex conversations across 13 accent-and-condition strata, together with 57 adversarial defect-injected clips. The evidence for Gemini 2.5 Flash is consistent across three tests. (i) On 5 of 8 dimensions the LALM-human Spearman rho departs from the pairwise human-human rho by at most 0.07, and on 7 of 8 dimensions the two quantities 95 percent bootstrap confidence intervals overlap. (ii) The LALM agrees with the three-rater human mean within 1 point on 60 to 92 percent of sessions on 6 of 8 dimensions. (iii) On 45 of 48 (defect, dimension) cells the LALM is as sensitive as humans or better under Newcombe-Wilson 95 percent confidence intervals, though most of these are underpowered nulls rather than demonstrated parity. Rank-ordering ability transfers across the Gemini family: 3.5 Flash improves simple agreement to 8 of 8 dimensions, while 3.1 Pro rates several dimensions markedly lower than humans despite comparable rank correlation. A model swap should be re-validated on calibration specifically, not assumed from rank-correlation alone. We identify four areas where deployment requires care, and we estimate that human rating alone for our current evaluation cadence costs roughly two orders of magnitude more than the equivalent LALM workload. The data presented here provides a defensible empirical basis for deploying the LALM as a substitute or fourth rater on the dimensions where the evidence supports it.
Jul 8, 2026cs.CL

SynthAVE: Scalable Synthetic Labeling for E-Commerce with LLM-Arena Validation

Fine-tuning large language models (LLMs) for e-commerce attribute extraction requires labeled data representative across thousands of product types, attributes, and multiple languages. This combinatorial scale translates to millions of annotations, rendering human labeling prohibitively costly. While recent work has demonstrated synthetic label generation using LLMs, deploying such approaches at industrial scale requires integrated quality control mechanisms. We present SynthAVE, a large-scale benchmark for attribute-value verification spanning 12,726 products across 229 product types, 792 attributes, and 4 languages (Spanish, French, Italian, German). To validate synthetic labels at scale, we introduce a multi-LLM arena framework where each sample is evaluated by 21 judge configurations (7 model families ×\times 3 prompts), with final labels determined via majority voting; disagreements with the synthetic label are expert-adjudicated and agreement cases are audited on a stratified sample. The majority vote ensemble agrees with expert labels at Cohen's κ=0.92κ= 0.92 (95.0% agreement), while individual judges agree with one another only moderately (Fleiss' κ=0.76κ= 0.76)--by design, since we select for diversity. This demonstrates that diverse models with varying individual judgments aggregate into highly reliable predictions, enabling cost-effective validation at scale while concentrating expert effort on the cases where it changes the label. We estimate the resulting label quality at 97.9%.
Jul 8, 2026cs.AI

The Blind Curator: How a Biased Judge Silently Disables Skill Retirement in Self-Evolving Agents

A self-evolving agent retires its bad skills by watching them fail, so what happens when the judge cannot see the failures? Skill retirement is the structural constraint that keeps a growing library from drifting below the no-skill baseline, but its guarantee assumes an unbiased reward, which is false for the LLM judges that reference-free tasks force upon us. We show that a biased judge does not merely add noise; it \emph{silently switches off the curator}. We make this precise with a corrupted-reward analysis and, isolating the causal channel by injecting corruption on top of a deterministic reward, a behavioral study on a reference-free report-writing testbed with a code-generation cross-check. Symmetric noise leaves retirement intact, but \emph{false-pass} bias (failures slipping through as passes) disables contribution-based retirement past a sharp threshold that no amount of data can cross. Separating genuine retirement from cap-eviction churn shows this \emph{mechanism} failure is universal, holding across domains and failure rates and sparing only near-zero-false-pass, verifier-like graders. The downstream \emph{outcome}, though, is regime-dependent: eval quality degrades only where the same corruption also starves skill synthesis, and otherwise holds steady, so the disabled curator is \emph{silent}, surfacing in no aggregate metric. The contribution is a behavioral safety result, not a performance one. A cheap defect-injection audit then tells an operator, before deployment, which side of the threshold their judge occupies.
Jul 7, 2026cs.CV

WebRetriever: A Large-Scale Comprehensive Benchmark for Efficient Web Agent Evaluation

As web agents increasingly demonstrate capabilities in automated task execution, the development of robust evaluation frameworks for assessing their navigation and task completion performance has emerged as a critical research priority. However, existing benchmarks exhibit fundamental limitations. First, they suffer from insufficient scale and limited domain diversity, constraining comprehensive evaluation of cross-domain generalization. Second, prevailing LLM-as-Judge evaluation methodologies inadequately capture fine-grained interaction semantics, particularly regarding precise query formulation and filtering operations. Third, current benchmarks predominantly emphasize navigation success metrics while neglecting critical requirements for real-world deployment scenarios. To address these limitations, we introduce WebRetriever, a large-scale benchmark encompassing 800 websites and 1,550 tasks across diverse domains, including consumer, professional, and enterprise sectors, with comprehensive coverage of user intent patterns. We propose NavEval (Navigation Evaluation), a novel LLM-as-Judge framework that leverages rich interaction context beyond visual screenshots, achieving state-of-the-art alignment with human judgment across multiple evaluation datasets. Furthermore, we establish three complementary evaluation protocols that collectively provide holistic assessment of web agent capabilities: navigation proficiency, knowledge-assisted interaction, and end-to-end task completion with information extraction. Extensive experimental analysis reveals substantial performance disparities across evaluation protocols, demonstrating that navigation success alone is an insufficient predictor of real-world application effectiveness. WebRetriever delivers fine-grained diagnostic insights into agent capabilities and establishes a rigorous foundation for advancing web agent research and development.
Jul 7, 2026cs.LG

More Convincing, Not More Correct: Self-Play Reward Hacking of Reference-Free LLM Judges

Training a language model against its own reference-free judgments (the premise of self-rewarding, self-play, and LLM-as-a-judge pipelines) assumes a model's verdict on a shown answer tracks correctness. We show it fails structurally: conditioned on a candidate, a judge scores plausibility, not correctness, leaving false-positive basins a policy learns to exploit. We measure this with a hidden-anchor audit: a held-out, cross-source exact-match check the judge never sees. On GSM8K with Qwen3 policies, self-play drives the judge's pass rate from 0.72 to 0.94 while true accuracy stays at 0.20 (three seeds). This reward hacking is not white-box gaming: the errors transfer across judge families (Qwen, Llama, Gemma) and scales, a strict three-judge ensemble still accepts 55% of them, and no plausibility-scoring defense closes the basin. The decisive variable is whether the judge commits an answer of its own before using the candidate: committing first drops the false-positive rate from 0.719 to 0.012, blind solving lifts discrimination to 0.96, and used as the training reward the de-anchored channel keeps false positives at zero, preventing the basin rather than only detecting it. A falsifiable bound (the gap is at most 1 - accuracy) predicts which regimes are exposed. The full arc replicates without training under best-of-N selection in code and competition math, and with a Gemma policy.
Jul 6, 2026cs.SE

LLM-Based Test Oracles: Source-of-Authority Taxonomy -- A Systematic Literature Review

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly decide whether software behaves correctly, either by writing a test oracle or by acting as one. Yet two oracles can look identical and rest on different ground: one assertion encodes a written specification, another only what the model learned in training. Prior secondary studies sort oracles by form or by technique, rarely by the property that governs how far a verdict can be trusted: where its authority comes from. This systematic literature review, reported under the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) 2020 guidelines, screens 2,436 records to 54 included studies, extended by citation searching (snowballing) to 83 in total. We read the corpus along three axes: the source of an oracle's authority, the form it takes, and the mechanism that adjudicates it. Just over half of the corpus reaches a verdict with no specification at all. That is what lets these oracles work on code with no specification to consult, and what leaves a challenged verdict with less to fall back on. Source and mechanism cross-cut rather than coincide, so a label such as LLM-as-a-judge names how a verdict is produced, not why it should be trusted. Oracle quality is most often judged by resemblance to a known oracle rather than by whether injected faults are caught. The first question to ask of any LLM oracle is therefore what one would point to in defending its verdict. The protocol, search query, and per-study coding sheet are released.
Jul 2, 2026cs.AI

Automated grading of Linux/bash examinations using large language models: a four-level cognitive taxonomy approach

Scalable and reliable grading of command-line examinations remains a challenge in computing education, where rising enrolments make manual marking difficult and rule-based autograders cannot handle partial credit, equivalent solutions, or syntactic variation. This paper evaluates whether four frontier Large Language Models (GPT, Claude Opus, Gemini, and GLM) can approximate expert judgment when grading short Linux/bash command responses. The study adopts a four-level cognitive taxonomy that combines cognitive complexity and operational impact, ranging from information retrieval (L1) and basic file manipulation (L2) to structural operations (L3) and advanced system management (L4). The models were tested with two prompt variants, a minimal baseline and a rubric-enhanced version, on 1200 real responses from second-year Computer Engineering students independently graded by three expert instructors. Gemini~3.0 Pro with rubric-guided prompting achieved the highest human-AI agreement (ICC(3,1) = 0.888, MAE = 0.10, Bland-Altman bias = -0.014). Agreement declined consistently as taxonomy level increased, with the largest discrepancies at higher levels. Across all models, rubric quality had a larger effect than provider choice, with structured prompts consistently improving agreement. These results show that question complexity is a reliable predictor of the difficulty LLMs face in grading accurately, and they establish a principled, taxonomy-based framework for determining which questions are suitable for AI-assisted grading and which require human review, while also providing a transferable evaluation protocol and prompt templates.
Jul 2, 2026cs.CL

Challenges and Recommendations for LLM-as-a-Judge in Multilingual Settings and for Low-Resource Languages

LLM-as-a-Judge has become the dominant evaluation paradigm for many natural language generation tasks (albeit mostly in English) due to shortcomings of conventional metrics and high correlations with human judgment. There are now attempts to extend LLM-as-a-Judge to multilingual settings including low-resource languages. However, LLMs have limited proficiency in low-resource languages, and there is often no adequate human validation in these settings. To highlight the scope of the problem and current practices, we explore the use of LLM-as-a-Judge evaluators in ACL Anthology papers focusing on multilingual settings and low-resource languages across a diverse set of tasks. Out of 650 papers mentioning LLM-as-a-judge, only 33 of them focus on low-resource or multilingual settings. Our in-depth analysis of these papers indicates inconsistent evaluation outcomes, a tendency to overtrust LLM judgments in multilingual settings, and the widespread reliance on a single judge model per study. To help the NLP community further, we conclude with a checklist of recommendations about how to use LLM-as-a-Judge in multilingual and low-resource settings
Jul 2, 2026cs.LG

Ask the Right Comparison:Bias-Aware Bayesian Active Top-kk Ranking with LLM Judges

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as cheap, scalable judges that compare candidate outputs pairwise -- to rank responses, select models, or triage papers. Yet LLM judges are both noisy and systematically biased: they favor verbose or well-formatted answers and exhibit position effects, so simply aggregating their votes recovers a ranking of presentation, not of true quality. We study the practical goal of identifying the \topk{} items under a fixed comparison budget, and make two contributions. First, we cast judging as Bayesian inference over latent quality with explicit, judge-specific bias covariates (verbosity, position), regularized by a shrinkage prior so that the data decide which biases a given judge actually exhibits. Second, we introduce a \topk-aware active acquisition rule that chooses the next comparison to maximally reduce uncertainty about \topk{} \emph{membership}, rather than about the full ranking. On a controlled benchmark with known ground-truth quality, judged by sixteen real LLMs spanning open and proprietary families (Llama, Qwen, Phi-4, GPT-4o-mini/5.1/5.5, Gemini, DeepSeek, and Claude Haiku/Sonnet/Opus), naive aggregation plateaus at a wrong \topk{} on biased judges regardless of budget, while our bias-aware model recovers it; \topk-aware acquisition reaches this ceiling with far fewer comparisons than round-robin or a global-uncertainty (D-optimal) rule. Bias is real but heterogeneous and capability-dependent: cheap and mid-tier judges carry a strong verbosity bias that our model corrects (lifting recall from \sim$$0.5--0.60.6 to 0.840.84--1.01.0), whereas the frontier judges we tested show little bias and already rank accurately, so bias-aware modeling changes little there.
Jul 2, 2026cs.CL

SPLIT: Cross-Lingual Empathy and Cultural Grounding in English and Ukrainian LLM Responses

Large Language Models are increasingly deployed in emotional-support contexts and crisis-related situations. Nevertheless, their cross-lingual abilities in these circumstances remain underexplored. Existing benchmarks emphasize multilingual performance but rarely examine crisis-related empathy and cultural grounding in low-to-mid-resource languages. We introduce SPLIT, a 500-prompt benchmark designed to evaluate LLM consistency in generating emotionally grounded responses across five categories: Stress, Panic, Loneliness, Internal Displacement, and Tension. We evaluate three technically diverse LLMs across three dimensions: Empathetic Accuracy, Linguistic Naturalness, and Contextual & Cultural Grounding. The framework aims to assess and compare the quality of LLM responses in both English and Ukrainian languages, as well as to explore the reliability of the LLM-as-a-jury paradigm. Our findings reveal that Gemini-2.5-Flash and LLaMA-3.3-70B-Instruct degrade when transitioning to Ukrainian, while DeepSeek-V3 remains comparatively stable within our benchmark. We additionally find that human and AI evaluators agree weakly on empathy and naturalness but diverge on cultural grounding. We further argue that producing Ukrainian text is not equivalent to producing Ukrainian emotional support. Our findings may assist in the future development of more culturally tailored benchmark designs, as well as encourage a stronger emphasis on human-centered evaluation.
Jul 2, 2026cs.LG

Many Voices, One Reward: Multi-Role Rubric Generation for LLM Judging and Reward Modeling

Reliable reward and preference signals are critical for evaluating and optimizing large language models on open-ended tasks. Rubric-based judges offer a transparent way to decompose such judgments into explicit evaluation criteria, but existing annotation-free rubric generators typically rely on a single generic evaluator. As a result, they may overlook important dimensions of human preference, a failure mode we term dimensional blind spots. To address this limitation, we propose Multi-Role Rubric Generation (MRRG), a training-free and reference-free framework that elicits evaluation criteria from multiple complementary roles and consolidates them into an auditable rubric-based scorer. This scorer can be used both to validate pairwise preferences and to provide rewards for GRPO-style Reinforcement Learning with Verifiable Rewards (RLVR). Experiments on preference validation benchmarks show that MRRG consistently outperforms single-role rubric generation baselines across multiple backbone models. Further RLVR experiments demonstrate that MRRG yields a stronger reward signal for improving open-ended generation.
Jul 1, 2026cs.CL

AGC-Bench: Measuring Artificial General Creativity

Creativity research has debated whether creativity is domain-specific (e.g., visual, writing, science), and if it is psychometrically separable from general intelligence. Both questions now apply to LLMs, but a unified benchmark of AI creativity remains elusive. We introduce AGC-Bench, an artificial general creativity benchmark built from a systematic review of the AI creativity literature (3,101 papers screened, 497 benchmarks identified), paired with an agentic harness that converts idiosyncratic codebases into HELM-standardized benchmarks. The first release covers 78 datasets spanning brainstorming, problem solving, STEM, narrative, figurative language, and humor. To address bias in LLM-as-judge, we apply Judge Response Theory -- a psychometric calibration of judge leniency/severity; we then fine-tune Qwen3-30B on the bias-corrected ratings of three frontier LLMs to produce AGC-Judge, an open-weight model that robustly scores new creativity benchmarks it was not trained on. Results reveal frontier models at the top of the AGC-Bench leaderboard, with open models close behind. LLMs show different creative strengths, ranking higher on some domains (e.g., writing) than others (e.g., scientific ideation). Extensive experiments yield three main findings. First, applying factor analysis across 83 LLMs, we recover a single creativity factor 'c', analogous to the 'g' factor of general intelligence, that explains 81.5% of variance, related to but separable from general knowledge/reasoning. Second, we show that prompting models to "be creative" boosts their performance far more than enabling reasoning, evidence that the benchmark tracks creativity over general ability. Third, on a human-matched subset, we find the top human still leads the top LLM on creativity. We release AGC-Bench with a public leaderboard, AGC-Judge, and human data as open infrastructure for measuring AI creativity at scale.
Jul 1, 2026cs.CL

Evaluating Large Language Model Raters for German Open-Response Clinical Questions: A Physician-Annotated Benchmark Study of Agreement, Evaluator Bias, and Abstention

Background: Expert-annotated benchmarks for non-English open-response clinical questions are scarce. LLM-as-a-judge systems may scale evaluation but require validation. Objective: To introduce MedQADE, a standardized German open-response clinical benchmark with physician reference annotations, and evaluate LLM-as-a-judge alignment, self- and intra-family bias, and abstention. Methods: The benchmark contains 3,800 question-answer sets with answers from five student LLMs and annotations from 10 physicians. All 10 rated the 200-question core; two primary raters assessed each of 3,600 extension questions, with the tenth resolving disagreements. Nine LLM evaluators assessed all sets. We assessed physician reliability, student-model accuracy, evaluator alignment, bias, and abstention. Results: Physicians showed moderate-to-substantial agreement on answer correctness (unweighted mean pairwise Cohen's kappa = 0.612) but limited agreement on question difficulty (Krippendorff's alpha = 0.208 using squared numeric-score distances). Student-model accuracy was 17.8%-66.0% and generally decreased with physician-rated difficulty. Gemini 3 Flash approached the leave-one-out physician reference (kappa = 0.694 vs 0.709). Four of five models rated their own responses more favorably than out-of-family evaluators; five of six intra-family comparisons were positive. Physician abstention increased with perceived difficulty. Seven of nine LLM evaluators abstained in no more than 0.51% of evaluations; the two strongest evaluators assigned definitive labels to every response. Conclusions: Strong LLM evaluators approached physician agreement, but evaluator bias and low observed abstention warrant physician validation and further assessment of selective deferral before fully automated evaluation. These results do not establish clinical safety.
Jul 1, 2026cs.AI

LitReview Arena: Evaluating Literature Review Agents with Battle-Style Peer Review Platform

Literature reviews are essential to scientific progress, but rigorously evaluating automatically generated reviews remains difficult because many aspects of research utility depend on expert judgment rather than reference-overlap metrics. We introduce LitReview Arena, a battle-style evaluation platform with a structured protocol tailored to literature review quality: domain experts with AI paper-writing experience compare anonymized drafts, are matched to topics within their expertise, and provide dimension-wise outcomes over five literature-review-specific criteria. From this protocol, we collect approximately 3k expert judgments, each containing five dimension-wise outcomes, and show that even the strongest current systems win only 23.0% of decisive matches against human drafts on overall utility, while agentic LLMs such as Sonar Deep Research substantially outperform base language models by over 60%. We further find that existing LLM-as-a-judge methods are substantially misaligned with human experts (Spearman's rho=0.467), especially on synthesis-heavy criteria such as paper structure and research suggestions. Using the collected preference data, we provide an expert-calibrated evaluator, LitJudge, which improves alignment to Spearman's rho=0.78, comparable to inter-expert consistency; code and data are publicly available at https://github.com/VanellopeAsher/LitReview-Arena.
Jul 1, 2026cs.LG

Mapping the Evaluation Frontier: An Empirical Survey of the Bias-Reliability Tradeoff Across Eleven Evaluator-Agent Conditions

The bias-reliability tradeoff conjectures that LLM evaluation systems are constrained in (gamma, H, CV) space, where evaluator coupling (gamma), strategy diversity (H), and small-sample measurement reliability (CV(N)) cannot be simultaneously optimized at fixed sample size N. Prior evidence rests on n=5 conditions with complete metrics from a single study. We expand the empirical base to 11 conditions, measuring gamma and H for all 11 (nine with valid weight vectors) and CV(N=5) for seven with sufficient seeds (N >= 5). Five conditions provide the complete (gamma, H, CV) triple. The data confirm the trade-off: conditions with low evaluator coupling (gamma < 0.2) exhibit high measurement noise (CV(N=5) > 1.0), while conditions with strong coupling (gamma > 0.9) achieve low noise (CV(N=5) < 0.16). The correlation r(H, gamma) = -0.989 (n=5, excluding GPT-4o conditions) confirms that evaluator coupling suppresses strategy diversity. Four GPT-4o conditions show gamma=0.000 and H=1.000 across all seeds -- a pattern we attribute to version drift in the June 2026 GPT-4o API. No condition occupies the region {gamma < 0.2, CV(N=5) < 0.3}. We release all per-condition metrics as a standardized benchmark dataset for evaluator comparison.
Jun 30, 2026cs.CL

Benchmarking Frontier LLMs on Arabic Cultural and Sociolinguistic Knowledge: A Cross-Evaluation Framework with Human SME Ground Truth

The cost of human expert evaluation is a principal bottleneck to deploying language models in specialized, high-stakes domains. This is particularly acute for Arabic sociolinguistic knowledge: credible grading requires not only linguistic fluency but deep cultural familiarity that cannot be approximated by surface-level metrics. We address this with a cross-evaluation framework instantiated on two underrepresented Arabic dialect communities: Egyptian and Iraqi Arabic. We contribute 103 validated prompt-rubric pairs (70 Egyptian, 33 Iraqi; 53 Cultural, 50 Linguistic), authored and graded by native-speaker SMEs using penalty-weighted rubrics distinguishing positive content requirements from answer-specific negative error criteria. Three frontier LLMs serve as target models (graded by human SMEs across 302 unique prompt-response pairs), while five frontier LLMs serve as automated judges enforcing a provider-level self-evaluation guard. A dual-metric scheme combining Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD) with Signed Mean Error separates directional grading bias from symmetric noise. Across 1,307 judge evaluations: GPT-5.4 is the most reliable judge (MADj = 10.21 pp, Signed Error = -1.12%); four of five judges show systematic leniency (+2.01% to +6.56%); Cultural tasks are harder to grade than Linguistic tasks for all judges (MAD gap 1.83-4.78 pp); and models substantially outperform on Egyptian prompts compared to Iraqi prompts. However, given leniency differences between Iraqi and Egyptian SMEs, we cannot solely attribute this gap to model knowledge. We therefore emphasize findings that do not assume identical leniency across human graders. Across all samples, implicit cultural reasoning -- requiring models to simulate native-speaker judgment rather than rely on lexical verification -- emerges as the primary failure mode for automated grading across all judge models.
Jun 30, 2026cs.CL

CLExEval: A Human-in-the-Loop Framework for Qualitative Evaluation of LLM Clinical Reasoning

Large Language Models (LLMs) achieve strong results on many medical benchmarks, but their clinical reasoning remains difficult to evaluate reliably. A central risk is an evaluation illusion: fluent and well-structured explanations can appear clinically convincing even when the final diagnosis is incorrect. We introduce CLExEval, a human-in-the-loop framework for evaluating LLM clinical reasoning under progressive information masking. CLExEval combines 5,600 expert-physician annotations with 200 clinical reasoning traces derived from 40 rare diagnostic cases. Our analysis identifies three recurring failure patterns: (i) verbosity bias, where GPT-4o-mini's diagnostic accuracy drops from 95.0% to 32.5% under information scarcity; (ii) a hidden knowledge paradox, where a specialist model reaches 92.5% maximum diagnostic potential but fails to retrieve that knowledge reliably in verbose contexts; and (iii) a 68.6% reasoning-to-output mismatch, where correct diagnoses appear in reasoning traces but are not reflected in final answers. We further evaluate the LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm on a human-verified failure set (n = 142). GPT-4o-mini approved 47.9% of clinically incorrect outputs, while HuatuoGPT-o1 approved all validly scored failures and showed a positive self-preference bias. These results suggest that standalone automated clinical evaluations can substantially overestimate clinical reliability without expert-grounded validation.
Jun 30, 2026cs.LG

Calibrating the Evaluator: Does Probability Calibration Mitigate Preference Coupling in LLM Agent Feedback Loops?

When large language model (LLM) agents adapt their behavior through evaluator feedback, systematic evaluator biases propagate into the agent's learned strategy distribution - a phenomenon termed evaluator preference coupling. Prior work has documented this coupling and established a diagnostic framework (EPC) to measure it, but has not investigated whether calibration techniques can mitigate the effect. We present the first study of evaluator calibration as mitigation: applying probability calibration to the evaluator's pairwise judgments to reduce spurious preference propagation. In a controlled within-subjects experiment (N=5) comparing standard binary TTRL (win/loss) with confidence-calibrated TTRL (probability-weighted updates) using DeepSeek-V4-Pro as executor and GLM5.2 as evaluator, we find that calibration reduces the coupling coefficient gamma by 20-49% and Jensen-Shannon divergence by 45-67%. A symmetric-LR control confirms the effect is not due to reduced update asymmetry. We release the calibrated TTRL protocol and recommend it as a lightweight mitigation for LLM-as-judge deployment pipelines.
Jun 30, 2026cs.CL

Probing Stylistic Appropriation using Large Language Models: An Evaluation Framework for Copyright Infringement under EU Law

Large language models (LLM) trained on web-scale corpora generate output that may infringe copyright, yet existing technical safeguards focus narrowly on verbatim memorisation. EU copyright doctrine applies a broader standards: substantial similarity, which extends to stylistic choices, narrative structure, and creative elaboration. This mismatch between what current methods detect and what the law protects leaves a significant compliance gap. We introduce PSALM, an LLM-as-a-judge framework that operationalises EU copyright doctrine through ten evaluators assessing computational overlap, stylistic dimensions (writing style, narrative voice), content dimensions (character, plot, scene, world building), and statutory exceptions (parody, pastiche, quotation, scènes à faire). Applying PSALM to Llama~3.2 models fine-tuned on translated historical Dutch literary works, we find that: 1) instruction-tuned models exhibit non-trivial baseline stylistic similarity prior to corpus exposure; 2) fine-tuning induces systematic stylistic appropriation across all infringement-relevant dimensions, extending beyond verbatim memorisation to abstract narrative patterns; 3) Negative Preference Optimisation unlearning substantially reduces similarity but leaves detectable residual stylistic patterns. These findings indicate that safeguards targeting literal copying alone are insufficient to mitigate broader copyright risks. PSALM provides infrastructure for auditable, legally informed compliance evaluation, though the relationship between automated similarity scores and infringement determinations requires validation by legal experts. This work bridges qualitative legal standards and quantitative technical measurement, exposing fundamental tensions between generative AI and EU intellectual property law.
Jun 30, 2026cs.AI

Beyond Compilation: Evaluating Faithful Natural-Language-to-Lean Statement Formalization

Lean verifies that a generated declaration is well typed, but not that it expresses the statement a user intended. We study two questions for autoformalization without canonical Lean targets: whether LLM judges can provide a usable proxy for human semantic review, and how much compilation overstates faithfulness across systems. Our criterion combines Lean compilation with strict semantic consensus between GPT-5.2 and Gemini-2.5-Pro. On an independently audited random sample, it agrees with human majority on 89.7% of cases (Wilson 95% CI: 82.1--94.3%). Across eight systems evaluated on 400 graduate-level statements, every system has a nonzero compile--faithfulness gap, whose observed magnitude ranges from 3.0 to 29.0 percentage points. The full GPT-5.2 tool-augmented agent shows the largest gap, compiling 89.5% while satisfying the semantic criterion on 60.5%. Human review, an independent third-family judge, and a BEq formal cross-check provide complementary evidence that the accepted core is reliable and that most audited outputs in the gap are genuine semantic mismatches. A secondary 232^3 factorial analysis shows that elaboration feedback is the largest validity intervention, yet does not eliminate semantic drift. LLM judging is therefore useful as a human-calibrated, conservative aggregate measure, not as an equivalence oracle.
Jun 29, 2026cs.CL

Measuring Judgment Quality in Natural-Language Explanations: Evidence from Forecasting Tournaments

Decision-makers routinely rely on expert judgments accompanied by written explanations, yet explanation quality is difficult to measure at scale. Forecasting tournaments offer a natural testing ground: probabilistic judgments are paired with natural-language rationales and scored against realized outcomes. We introduce Explanation Quality Markers (EQMs), a set of sixty theory-guided reasoning patterns scored by large language models (LLMs). In a pre-registered analysis of over 55,000 forecast-rationale pairs from a multiyear forecasting tournament, EQMs predict accuracy at both the forecast and forecaster levels, consistently outperforming pre-LLM text-analysis methods. More than 90% of statistically significant pattern-level EQM-accuracy correlations match our directional hypotheses. The signal is asymmetric: EQMs identify likely underperformers more reliably than they distinguish the very best forecasters. Benchmarked against traditional indicators of forecasting skill, EQMs are the strongest predictor at the forecast level and competitive at the forecaster level, though weaker than prior accuracy. Human ratings of rationale quality are less consistently correlated with accuracy and place disproportionate weight on rationale length. Results transfer to an independent forecasting study. EQMs provide a scalable, interpretable method for extracting judgment-relevant information from written explanations.
Jun 29, 2026cs.AI

RoPoLL: Robust Panel of LLM Judges

The LLM Jury, a Panel of LLM Evaluators (PoLL) reporting consensus scores, has become a practical alternative to single-judge LLM evaluation, yet its statistical behavior remains poorly understood. We formalize the LLM Jury under the Huber contamination model and show that PoLL incurs unbounded bias under any positive contamination, regardless of jury size, whenever a single judge fails in a biased, LLM-typical way (mode collapse, sycophancy, safety refusal). Framing jury consensus as classical robust mean estimation, we propose RoPoLL (Robust Panel of LLM-as-Judge), which preserves the PoLL panel but replaces the aggregation function with a robust mean estimator, instantiated with the geometric median (GM): tuning-free, with the optimal finite-sample breakdown point 1/2. A finite-sample error bound and a matching information-theoretic minimax lower bound agree on the parametric rate sigma*sqrt(d/N) and differ on the breakdown floor by a factor of sqrt(d), a statistical-computational gap that polynomial-time RoPoLL pays relative to the intractable Tukey halfspace median. Across 13 open-weight judges (4B-675B), three reward-model benchmarks, and four corruption regimes at rates up to 50%, RoPoLL dominates PoLL on every biased corruption type: by about 19% on cross-dimensional attacks at matched compute, and by orders of magnitude on heavy-tailed Byzantine adversaries. A 3-judge RoPoLL committee at 38B beats Mistral-Large-3 (675B) by 1.31x on HelpSteer-2 under 30% bimodal-random corruption, an 18x parameter advantage at better accuracy; a Noisy-GT control confirms the premium is paid against biased contamination, not benign imprecision.
Jun 29, 2026cs.CL

Training Therapeutic Judges and Multi-Agent Systems for Human-Aligned Mental Health Support

Large language models show promise for mental health support, yet therapeutic quality improves only when evaluation functions as an actionable control signal rather than a passive metric. We introduce a framework that formulates therapeutic response generation as a decision-refinement problem driven by multi-dimensional, human-aligned evaluation. In Stage I, we introduce TheraJudge, an open-source therapeutic evaluator trained via preference-based optimization on human-annotated data to produce reliable judgments across 7 psychological dimensions. In Stage II, we introduce TheraAgent, which operationalizes TheraJudge's evaluations through a coordinated refinement process with specialized Critic, Coach, and Therapist roles that translate evaluative signals into targeted response revisions. Empirically, TheraJudge achieves strong agreement with clinician ratings, with intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC = 0.87-0.95), surpassing supervised baselines and strong closed-source judges, particularly on critical dimensions such as Safety, Relevance, and Empathy. Acting on these evaluations, TheraAgent yields a +0.43 improvement in human-rated therapeutic quality (on a 5-point scale) under blind evaluation, with 96% clinician inter-rater reliability. Low-quality responses (≤3\leq 3) improve by +2.45 points with a 94% recovery rate, demonstrating targeted correction of unsafe outputs. Overall, our results indicate that effective alignment of mental-health LLMs stems from acting on human-aligned evaluation, rather than relying solely on stronger generation. We release code at https://github.com/vis-nlp/TheraAlign.
Jun 29, 2026cs.CL

Poller: Are LLMs Suitable for Evaluating the Poetry Understanding Task?

Traditional automatic evaluation methods have been shown to be unsuitable for modern Chinese poetry because of the distinct nature of this literary genre. Human evaluation remains reliable, but is expensive and not applicable to large-scale data. In this paper, we propose Poller (Poetry LLM Evaluator), a novel method leveraging large language models (LLMs) to evaluate the poetry understanding task. Specifically, our method requires LLMs to play the role of a poem's author with detailed information, thereby emulating human evaluation and judgment by adopting the poet's perspective. We conducted comprehensive experiments on multiple LLMs, evaluating the interpretations of poems across eight specialized dimensions. Experimental results demonstrate that our method effectively reduces the evaluation error between LLMs and humans. Especially for specific dimension evaluation, Poller-based LLMs achieve a 94.55% and 89.53% error reduction for rhetorical techniques and defamiliarization, respectively, compared to baseline methods. These performances are unattainable by conventional LLM evaluation methods. Experimental results from multiple LLMs across various dimensions validate the efficacy of our method. This work bridges the gap between automated efficiency and human expertise, establishing a foundation for automated evaluation in poetry-related tasks.
Jun 29, 2026cs.AI

EMPATH: A Multilingual Auditor-Judge Benchmark for Safety Evaluation of Emotional-Support Chatbots

Safety benchmarks often buy scalability by fixing the prompt, the language, and the turn structure. For emotional-support chatbots, that bargain hides precisely where safety failures emerge: across a multilingual, multi-turn crisis conversation. We present EMPATH, a benchmark for safety evaluation of emotional-support chatbots. An auditor model role-plays help-seeking users, generating multi-turn conversations from 140 seed instructions and 34 personas. A judge model scores each full transcript against 19 metrics across five dimensions: crisis handling, therapeutic quality, conversational integrity, emotional safety, and cultural adaptation. EMPATH is built for Mexican Spanish and US English; the studies reported here run in Mexican Spanish. Auditor and judge are drawn from different model families, and the judge is treated as an instrument to be calibrated rather than trusted. A strict per-criterion rubric reveals material score inflation on 10 of the 19 metrics and restores discrimination. We study the measurement properties of the benchmark through judge calibration and cross-family inter-judge agreement. We also illustrate EMPATH on three frontier models, one of them open-weight. Aggregate scores sit within 0.74 points of one another, but per-metric profiles diverge by up to six points in model-specific places. Under the standard rubric, both the ranking and the weak spots are stable across a second, cross-family judge: 93% of scores fall within plus or minus 1. A five-run test-retest adds a second axis: even the steadiest model swings from 2 to 10 on a crisis metric across identical re-runs, and deepseek-v4-pro returns a different conversation on every run even at temperature 0. Run-to-run reliability is therefore a per-model safety property, not noise to average away. EMPATH is system-agnostic; the pipeline, seeds, personas, and rubrics are released for reuse.