Equal Ranking Quality, Different Decisions: Measuring and Reducing Order Dependence in LLM Scorers
In passage reranking, response ranking and multi-document question answering, LLMs can score several candidate documents or responses together in one prompt, each still receiving its own score. Such scorers are selected on ranking quality, but their scores determine a decision: what a score threshold retains, a reader answers, or which chosen/rejected pair enters preference training. Because the candidates share that prompt, reordering them changes their scores. The same query over the same candidates should still yield the same decision. However, equal ranking quality does not imply equal decisions: on passage reranking, five trained scorers within 0.010 nDCG@10 retain sets that overlap ...
| Authors | Markus Frohmann, Mahdiyar Ali Akbar Alavi, Elizabeth Lingg et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 27 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 September 2026 |
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