Aligning Black-box Language Models with Human Judgments

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automated judges to evaluate recommendation systems, search engines, and other subjective tasks, where relying on human evaluators can be costly, time-consuming, and unscalable. LLMs offer an efficient solution for continuous, automated evaluation. However, since the systems that are built and improved with these judgments are ultimately designed for human use, it is crucial that LLM judgments align closely with human evaluators to ensure such systems remain human-centered. On the other hand, aligning LLM judgments with human evaluators is challenging due to individual variability and biases in human judgments. We propose a simple yet effective framework to align LLM judgments with individual human evaluators or their aggregated judgments, without retraining or fine-tuning the LLM. Our approach learns a linear mapping between the LLM's outputs and human judgments, achieving over 142% average improvement in agreement across 29 tasks with only a small number of calibration examples used for training. Notably, our method works in zero-shot and few-shot settings, exceeds inter-human agreement on four out of six tasks, and enables smaller LLMs to achieve performance comparable to that of larger models.