Pair Difficulty Matters: Rethinking Pairwise LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation and Consistency
Large Language Model judges are widely used to rank texts and text-generating systems through pairwise comparison, and their reliability is typically assessed via three proxies: position bias, transitivity, and pairwise agreement (self- or human-labeled). Because these proxies drive judge selection and benchmarking, a substantial literature reporting that judges perform poorly on them risks steering practitioners away from otherwise capable evaluators. We argue this assessment is misleading. Under the Bradley--Terry geometry underlying pairwise aggregation, each proxy is dominated by close-rank-gap pairs, where inconsistency is information-theoretically expected and individual verdicts co...
| Authors | Bruno Brocai, Maria Becker |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 29 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 29 September 2026 |
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