Will the Judge Flip? Predicting Position-Sensitive LLM Judgments from Residual Stream Activations
The order in which candidate responses are presented can change an LLM judge's verdict. Detecting such a position flip ordinarily requires judging each pair in both orders, which doubles the number of judgments. We investigate whether residual stream activations recorded immediately before the initial verdict can predict a flip. We use nested grouped cross-validation to evaluate regularized linear probes on 534 JudgeBench pairs for three Qwen3 judges and Llama-3.1-8B. The linear probes achieve AUROCs of .621-.850 and outperform a combined baseline that uses verbalized confidence, verdict-label logits, response lengths, and the judge's initial choice by .062-.113 AUROC. Linear probes train...
| Authors | Hashmath Shaik, Gnaneswar Villuri, Alex Doboli |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 5 October 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 5 October 2026 |
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