Necessary but Not Sufficient: Temperature Control and Reproducibility in LLM-as-Judge Safety Evaluations
LLM-as-judge ("grader") components are now standard in evaluation harnesses, including safety evaluations where a pass/fail verdict may gate downstream deployment decisions. A widespread assumption is that setting the grader's sampling temperature to 0 makes grading deterministic. We test this assumption against a real safety-evaluation codebase (Japan AISI's open-source aisev) and show it fails on two levels. First, the harness invokes its grader without setting temperature or seed; the underlying provider silently applies its default of 1.0, so items near the decision boundary flip pass/fail across identical runs (per-item disagreement up to ~50% over 20 runs). Second, pinning temperatu...
| Authors | Hiroki Tamba |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 24 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 24 June 2026 |
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