Judging the Judges: Evaluating Alignment and Vulnerabilities in
  LLMs-as-Judges
Authors: name: Aman Singh Thakur; name: Kartik Choudhary; name: Venkat Srinik Ramayapally; name: Sankaran Vaidyanathan; name: Dieuwke Hupkes
Published: 2024-06-18 13:49:54

Abstract: Offering a promising solution to the scalability challenges associated with
human evaluation, the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm is rapidly gaining traction as an
approach to evaluating large language models (LLMs). However, there are still
many open questions about the strengths and weaknesses of this paradigm, and
what potential biases it may hold. In this paper, we present a comprehensive
study of the performance of various LLMs acting as judges. We leverage TriviaQA
as a benchmark for assessing objective knowledge reasoning of LLMs and evaluate
them alongside human annotations which we found to have a high inter-annotator
agreement. Our study includes 9 judge models and 9 exam taker models -- both
base and instruction-tuned. We assess the judge model's alignment across
different model sizes, families, and judge prompts. Among other results, our
research rediscovers the importance of using Cohen's kappa as a metric of
alignment as opposed to simple percent agreement, showing that judges with high
percent agreement can still assign vastly different scores. We find that both
Llama-3 70B and GPT-4 Turbo have an excellent alignment with humans, but in
terms of ranking exam taker models, they are outperformed by both JudgeLM-7B
and the lexical judge Contains, which have up to 34 points lower human
alignment. Through error analysis and various other studies, including the
effects of instruction length and leniency bias, we hope to provide valuable
lessons for using LLMs as judges in the future.