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arXiv · 2502.14074

Investigating Non-Transitivity in LLM-as-a-Judge

Yi Xu·Laura Ruis·Tim Rocktäschel·Robert Kirk
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Abstract

Automatic evaluation methods based on large language models (LLMs) are emerging as the standard tool for assessing the instruction-following abilities of LLM-based agents. The most common method in this paradigm, pairwise comparisons with a baseline model, critically depends on the assumption of transitive preferences. However, the validity of this assumption remains largely unexplored. In this study, we investigate the presence of non-transitivity within the AlpacaEval framework and analyze its effects on model rankings. We find that LLM judges exhibit non-transitive preferences, leading to rankings that are sensitive to the choice of the baseline model. To mitigate this issue, we show that round-robin tournaments combined with Bradley-Terry models of preference can produce more reliable rankings. Notably, our method increases both the Spearman correlation and the Kendall correlation with Chatbot Arena (95.0% -> 96.4% and 82.1% -> 86.3% respectively). To address the computational cost of round-robin tournaments, we propose Swiss-Wise Iterative Matchmaking (Swim) tournaments, using a dynamic matching strategy to capture the benefits of round-robin tournaments while maintaining computational efficiency.

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Yi Xu, Laura Ruis, Tim Rocktäschel, Robert Kirk. 2025-02-19. Investigating Non-Transitivity in LLM-as-a-Judge. https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14074

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