EMNLP Findings2025
Rating Roulette: Self-Inconsistency in LLM-As-A-Judge Frameworks
Rajarshi Haldar, Julia Hockenmaier
Abstract
As Natural Language Generation (NLG) continues to be widely adopted, properly assessing it has become quite difficult. Lately, using large language models (LLMs) for evaluating these generations has gained traction, as they tend to align more closely with human preferences than conventional n-gram or embedding-based metrics. In our experiments, we show that LLM judges have low intra-rater reliability in their assigned scores across different runs. This variance makes their ratings inconsistent, almost arbitrary in the worst case, making it difficult to measure how good their judgments actually are. We quantify this inconsistency across different NLG tasks and benchmarks and see if judicious use of LLM judges can still be useful following proper guidelines.
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Cited by top-tier papers5
- CDRRM: Contrast-Driven Rubric Generation for Reliable and Interpretable Reward ModelingDengcan Liu, Fengkai Yang, Xiaohan Wang, Shurui Yan et al.KDD 2026 · 12 citations
- Label Effects: Shared Heuristic Reliance in Trust Assessment by Humans and LLM-as-a-JudgeXin Sun, Di Wu, Sijing Qin, Isao Echizen et al.ACL 2026 · 2 citations
- Persona2Web: Benchmarking Personalized Web Agents for Contextual Reasoning with User HistorySerin Kim, Sangam Lee, Dongha LeeICML 2026
- The Consistency Dilemma in LLMs: Generator-Evaluator Agreement and Vulnerability to MistakesMarina Mancoridis, Zoe HitzigICML 2026
- Diagnosing the Reliability of LLM-as-a-Judge via Item Response TheoryJunhyuk Choi, Sohhyung Park, chanhee cho, Hyeonchu Park et al.ICML 2026
Builds on14
- Language Models are Few-Shot LearnersTom B. Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah et al.NeurIPS 2020 · 64,255 citations
- Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language ModelsJason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Maarten Bosma et al.NeurIPS 2022 · 22,562 citations
- BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERTTianyi Zhang, Varsha Kishore, Felix Wu, Kilian Q. Weinberger et al.ICLR 2020 · 8,443 citations
- Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human PreferenceWei-Lin Chiang, Lianmin Zheng, Ying Sheng, Anastasios Nikolas Angelopoulos et al.ICML 2024 · 1,212 citations
- Self-Consistency Improves Chain of Thought Reasoning in Language ModelsXuezhi Wang, Jason Wei, Dale Schuurmans, Quoc V. Le et al.ICLR 2023 · 681 citations
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