Generative Judge for Evaluating Alignment
Written for the Research library (claude-opus-5-5) from the paper text, in our own words: the license "CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (arXiv)" does not allow redistributing the text itself. Original — arxiv.org/pdf/2310.05470
Summary
As LLMs move from classic NLP tasks toward open-ended, user-facing requests such as email drafting or brainstorming, evaluating them requires a judge that:
- works across many scenarios without gold references,
- supports more than one assessment format,
- explains its verdicts.
Existing open evaluators such as PandaLM and Shepherd each cover a single protocol, rely on synthetic or forum data, and give little explanation. API-based judges (GPT-4, ChatGPT, Claude) are costly and hard to reproduce.
The authors build AUTO-J, an open 13B-parameter judge. They define 58 scenarios with hand-written criteria and gather mostly real user queries paired with responses from various LLMs. GPT-4, guided by the scenario criteria, writes a critique and a verdict for each sample. These outputs are filtered and reformatted into one unified structure for training. AUTO-J handles both pairwise comparison and single-response rating, always with a structured critique. On a new balanced testbed covering all scenarios, it beats open-source and proprietary baselines. This makes it a cheaper, reproducible and interpretable option for evaluation and reward modeling.
Key points
- AUTO-J is a 13B generative judge that supports two protocols: pairwise response comparison and single-response rating, each with a natural-language critique.
- The training and judgment data span 58 real-world scenarios with 332 curated criteria. GPT-4 generated the supervision, which was then filtered by heuristics and post-processed.
- In pairwise evaluation, AUTO-J improves on the best open-source evaluator by 8.9%, on ChatGPT by 12.1% and on Claude-2 by 12.4%.
- The analysis shows reduced positional bias, more specific critiques than baselines, and usefulness as a reward model. In Best-of-N selection over Vicuna-7B-v1.5 outputs, picks with higher AUTO-J ratings also received higher GPT-4 scores.
- Released resources include the models, a scenario typology and classifier, criteria and prompts, and the critique data, available at github.com/GAIR-NLP/auto-j.
Cited by
- Prometheus 2: An Open Source Language Model Specialized in Evaluating Other Language Models
- LLMs-as-Judges: A Comprehensive Survey on LLM-based Evaluation Methods
- JudgeLM: Fine-tuned Large Language Models are Scalable Judges
Cite
@misc{li2023generative,
title = {{Generative Judge for Evaluating Alignment}},
author = {Li, Junlong and Sun, Shichao and Yuan, Weizhe and Fan, Run-Ze and Zhao, Hai and Liu, Pengfei},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2310.05470},
eprint = {2310.05470},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2310.05470}
}References
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