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

Aman Singh Thakur, Kartik Choudhary, Venkat Srinik Ramayapally, Sankaran Vaidyanathan, Dieuwke Hupkes

Keywords: LLMs, NLP, LLM Evaluation, LLM-as-a-Judge, Benchmarks

TL;DR: We conduct a comprehensive study of the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm in a relatively controlled setup and report many interesting findings about its strengths and weaknesses

Abstract: Offering a promising solution to the scalability challenges associated with human evaluation, the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm is rapidly gaining traction as an approach to evaluating large language models (LLMs). However, there are still many open questions about the strengths and weaknesses of this paradigm, and what potential biases it may hold. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of the performance of various LLMs acting as judges, focusing on a clean scenario in which inter-human agreement is high. Investigating thirteen judge models of different model sizes and families, judging answers of nine different ‘examtaker models’ – both base and instruction-tuned – we find that only the best (and largest) models achieve reasonable alignment with humans. However, they are still quite far behind inter-human agreement and their assigned scores may still differ with up to 5 points from human-assigned scores. In terms of their ranking of the nine exam-taker models, instead, also smaller models and even the lexical metric contains may provide a reasonable signal. Through error analysis and other studies, we identify vulnerabilities in judge models, such as their sensitivity to prompt complexity and length, and a tendency toward leniency. The fact that even the best judges differ from humans in this comparatively simple setup suggest that caution may be wise when using judges in more complex setups. Lastly, our research rediscovers the importance of using alignment metrics beyond simple percent alignment, showing that judges with high percent agreement can still assign vastly different scores.

Primary Area: generative models

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Submission Number: 5786