Reasoning Model Is Superior LLM-Judge, Yet Suffers from Biases

Hui Huang, Xuanxin Wu, Muyun Yang, Yuki Arase

Keywords: LLM-as-a-Judge, Large Reasoning Model

TL;DR: Reasoning model is superior LLM-Judge compared with its non-reasoning counterpart, yet it suffers from biases.

Abstract: This paper presents the first systematic comparison investigating whether Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) are superior judge to non-reasoning LLMs. Our empirical analysis yields four key findings: 1) LRMs outperform non-reasoning LLMs in terms of judgment accuracy, particularly on reasoning-intensive tasks; 2) LRMs demonstrate superior instruction-following capabilities in evaluation contexts; 3) LRMs exhibit enhanced robustness against adversarial attacks targeting judgment tasks; 4) However, LRMs still exhibit strong biases in superficial quality. To improve the robustness against biases, we propose PlanJudge, an evaluation strategy that prompts the model to generate an explicit evaluation plan before execution. Despite its simplicity, our experiments demonstrate that PlanJudge significantly mitigates biases in both LRMs and standard LLMs.

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Submission Type: Research Paper

Archival Status: Archival

Submission Number: 30