Judge Circuits Explain Format-Induced Inconsistency in LLM-as-a-Judge
LLM-as-a-judge has become the dominant paradigm for grading model outputs at scale, yet the same model assigns systematically different scores when its output format changes (e.g., a 1-5 rating vs. a True/False label). Existing diagnoses of these format-induced inconsistencies stop at the input-output level. Using Position-aware Edge Attribution Patching (PEAP), we causally investigate the internal mechanism in five open-weight instruction-tuned models (Gemma-3, Qwen2.5, Llama-3.1) across five judgment tasks. We find that judgments across structured understanding and open-ended preference tasks share a sparse Latent Evaluator sub-graph in the mid-to-late layers; zero-ablating it collapses...
| Authors | Nils Feldhus, Tanja Baeumel, Elena Golimblevskaia et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 15 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 September 2026 |
Silytics shows public metadata from arXiv and links to the original. Information may be incomplete or out of date. Last refreshed 17 October 2026. Licenses and terms of the original apply to the work itself. Not financial, legal or professional advice.