LLM Judges Have Dark Current: Stratified Null and Utility Tests for LLM Judge Reliability
Passing an exact-clone null gate does not entail passing a matched target-selection utility gate. We call a non-tie preference between exact duplicates dark current. On 102 prespecified fresh RewardBench 2 rows, all four configuration--criterion cells report 0/102 clone preferences. Both neutral utility arms pass, but strict utility lower bounds of .539 and .745 miss the .75 working threshold. Conversely, re-evaluation of the same rows on two additional configurations yields a neutral gpt-oss utility pass with 2/102 clone preferences, leaving low-null behavior uncertified. A separately frozen 485-row extension passes both aggregate working gates under both criteria on one local raw-text c...
| Authors | Hiroyasu Usami, Keisuke Hara, Ayato Tsuboi et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 14 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 12 October 2026 |
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