Three Ways Classical Test Theory Can Mislead About LLM Judges

arXiv:2609.29709 · cs.LG, cs.CL, stat.ME · Submitted 2026-08-31 · Read on arXiv

cs.LG, cs.CL, stat.ME

Submitted: 2026-08-31

Updated: 2026-09-30

Code: https://github.com/louisyzhu/llm-judge-reliability

Terminology

• Accuracy — 30× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Consistency — 9× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• LLM judge — 8× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Benchmark — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• LLM-as-a-Judge — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Decode — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Failure Modes — 2× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Generalizability — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Robustness — 1× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes

Sources

• LLM Evaluators Recognize and Favor Their Own Generations
• When Judgment Becomes Noise: How Design Failures in LLM Judge Benchmarks Silently Undermine Validity
• LLM Judges Have Dark Current: A Psychometric Datasheet for LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation
• A Coin Flip for Safety: LLM Judges Fail to Reliably Measure Adversarial Robustness
• Diagnosing the Reliability of LLM-as-a-Judge via Item Response Theory
• When LLM Judge Scores Look Good but Best-of-N Decisions Fail
• ValueBlindBench: Agreement-Gated Stress Testing of LLM-Judged Investment Rationales Before Returns Are Observable

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