JudgeProfile: Understanding and Steering Subjectivity in LLM Judges

Qi Cao; Kangning Liu; Xuan Kan; Shunwen Tan; Yang Pei; Dake Chen; Yatai Ji; Zixuan Ye; Yuanpeng Tu; Daniel Li; Junbiao Tang; Pengtao Xie; Zihao He

arXiv · 2609.36705

JudgeProfile: Understanding and Steering Subjectivity in LLM Judges

Qi Cao·Kangning Liu·Xuan Kan·Shunwen Tan·Yang Pei·Dake Chen·Yatai Ji·Zixuan Ye·Yuanpeng Tu·Daniel Li·Junbiao Tang·Pengtao Xie·Zihao He

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Abstract

LLM judges are inherently subjective, often favoring different responses in pairwise comparison when neither option is objectively wrong. To study this subjectivity, we introduce JudgeProfile, a framework that dissects LLM evaluation into perception (how a judge compares two responses across specific attributes like clarity, correctness, and detail) and prioritization (how much each attribute influences the final choice). We curate SubjectiveSet, a dataset of 50,013 response pairs from 17 public data sources, evaluated by 21 LLM judges across 87 attributes. We find a hidden consensus in perception: judges frequently agree on attribute judgments even when their overall choices diverge. Building on this separation, we first characterize each judge's prioritization using attribute weights estimated from its own overall choices. These weights differ across judges even when estimated from the same attribute judgments. We then learn new weights from reference labels to adapt their decisions to a target evaluation standard. Reweighting perceived attributes improves average held-out agreement with reference labels from 66.48% to 71.97%, outperforming fine-tuning and rubric prompting. Our findings show that understanding and steering the subjectivity of LLM judges requires attention not only to what they perceive, but also to how they prioritize it.

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Qi Cao, Kangning Liu, Xuan Kan, Shunwen Tan, Yang Pei, Dake Chen, Yatai Ji, Zixuan Ye, Yuanpeng Tu, Daniel Li, Junbiao Tang, Pengtao Xie, Zihao He. 2026-09-29. JudgeProfile: Understanding and Steering Subjectivity in LLM Judges. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.36705

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