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LLM judges show hidden agreement despite subjective choices

JudgeProfile: Understanding and Steering Subjectivity in LLM Judges

Abstract: LLM judges are inherently subjective, often favoring different responses in pairwise comparison when neither option is objectively wrong. To study this subjectivity, we introduce JudgeProfile, a framework that dissects LLM evaluation into perception (how a judge compares two responses across specific attributes like clarity, correctness, and detail) and prioritization (how much each attribute influences the final choice). We curate SubjectiveSet, a dataset of 50,013 response pairs from 17 public data sources, evaluated by 21 LLM judges across 87 attributes. We find a hidden consensus in perception: judges frequently agree on attribute judgments even when their overall choices diverge. Building on this separation, we first characterize each judge's prioritization using attribute weights estimated from its own overall choices. These weights differ across judges even when estimated from the same attribute judgments. We then learn new weights from reference labels to adapt their decisions to a target evaluation standard. Reweighting perceived attributes improves average held-out agreement with reference labels from 66.48% to 71.97%, outperforming fine-tuning and rubric prompting. Our findings show that understanding and steering the subjectivity of LLM judges requires attention not only to what they perceive, but also to how they prioritize it.

Tue 29 SeptArtificial Intelligence
The gist
LLM judges often disagree when choosing the better response between two answers, even if neither is clearly wrong. The authors created JudgeProfile, a way to understand these disagreements by breaking decisions into how judges see different qualities and how important those qualities are to them. By studying many judges and lots of data, they found judges usually agree on specific qualities but weigh them differently, causing different decisions overall. They improved agreement with standard labels by adjusting how judges prioritize qualities instead of changing their perceptions.
Open → 2609.36705v1