arXiv subjects

Laura Dietz

Publications and source records attributed to Laura Dietz.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Human-in-the-Loop Nugget Annotation for Accountable LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluations

Evaluating AI/Agentic system outputs reliably requires human judgment, but how one incorporates the human determines whether one gets a real quality signal or expensive theater. The common approaches either accidentally anchor human experts (leading to rubber-stamping) or leave them unsupported in cognitively demanding labeling tasks. We present a prototype of an annotation tool that implements a different division of labor: humans identify what information matters (nuggets), while LLMs handle high-volume matching of nuggets to system outputs. This plays to each party's strengths while maintaining genuine human oversight. We describe the Human-AI workflow, key design decisions, and how resulting nugget banks are used with automated judges.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

DoGMaTiQ: Automated Generation of Question-and-Answer Nuggets for Report Evaluation

Evaluation of long-form, citation-backed reports has lately received significant attention due to the wide-scale adoption of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. Core to many evaluation frameworks is the use of atomic facts, or nuggets, to assess a report's coverage of query-relevant information attested in the underlying collection. While nuggets have traditionally been represented as short statements, recent work has used question-answer (QA) representations, enabling fine-grained evaluations that decouple the information need (i.e. the question) from the potentially diverse content that satisfies it (i.e. its answers). A persistent challenge for nugget-based evaluation is the need to manually curate sets of nuggets for each topic in a test collection -- a laborious process that scales poorly to novel information needs. This challenge is acute in cross-lingual settings, where information is found in multilingual source documents. Accordingly, we introduce DoGMaTiQ, a pipeline for generating high-quality QA-based nugget sets in three stages: (1) document-grounded nugget generation, (2) paraphrase clustering, and (3) nugget subselection based on principled quality criteria. We integrate DoGMaTiQ nuggets with AutoArgue -- a recent nugget-based evaluation framework -- to enable fully automatic evaluation of generated reports. We conduct extensive experiments on two cross-lingual TREC shared tasks, NeuCLIR and RAGTIME, showing strong rank correlations with both human-in-the-loop and fully manual judgments. Finally, detailed analysis of our pipeline reveals that a strong LLM nugget generator is key, and that the system rankings induced by DoGMaTiQ are robust to outlier systems. We facilitate future research in report evaluation by publicly releasing our code and artifacts at https://github.com/manestay/dogmatiq.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Beyond Relevance: On the Relationship Between Retrieval and RAG Information Coverage

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems combine document retrieval with a generative model to address complex information seeking tasks like report generation. While the relationship between retrieval quality and generation effectiveness seems intuitive, it has not been systematically studied. We investigate whether upstream retrieval metrics can serve as reliable early indicators of the final generated response's information coverage. Through experiments across two text RAG benchmarks (TREC NeuCLIR 2024 and TREC RAG 2024) and one multimodal benchmark (WikiVideo), we analyze 15 text retrieval stacks and 10 multimodal retrieval stacks across four RAG pipelines and multiple evaluation frameworks (Auto-ARGUE and MiRAGE). Our findings demonstrate strong correlations between coverage-based retrieval metrics and nugget coverage in generated responses at both topic and system levels. This relationship holds most strongly when retrieval objectives align with generation goals, though more complex iterative RAG pipelines can partially decouple generation quality from retrieval effectiveness. These findings provide empirical support for using retrieval metrics as proxies for RAG performance.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Supporting Humans in Evaluating AI Summaries of Legal Depositions

While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to summarize long documents, this trend poses significant challenges in the legal domain, where the factual accuracy of deposition summaries is crucial. Nugget-based methods have been shown to be extremely helpful for the automated evaluation of summarization approaches. In this work, we translate these methods to the user side and explore how nuggets could directly assist end users. Although prior systems have demonstrated the promise of nugget-based evaluation, its potential to support end users remains underexplored. Focusing on the legal domain, we present a prototype that leverages a factual nugget-based approach to support legal professionals in two concrete scenarios: (1) determining which of two summaries is better, and (2) manually improving an automatically generated summary.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Incorporating Q&A Nuggets into Retrieval-Augmented Generation

RAGE systems integrate ideas from automatic evaluation (E) into Retrieval-augmented Generation (RAG). As one such example, we present Crucible, a Nugget-Augmented Generation System that preserves explicit citation provenance by constructing a bank of Q&A nuggets from retrieved documents and uses them to guide extraction, selection, and report generation. Reasoning on nuggets avoids repeated information through clear and interpretable Q&A semantics - instead of opaque cluster abstractions - while maintaining citation provenance throughout the entire generation process. Evaluated on the TREC NeuCLIR 2024 collection, our Crucible system substantially outperforms Ginger, a recent nugget-based RAG system, in nugget recall, density, and citation grounding.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2026

Insider Knowledge: How Much Can RAG Systems Gain from Evaluation Secrets?

RAG systems are increasingly evaluated and optimized using LLM judges, an approach that is rapidly becoming the dominant paradigm for system assessment. Nugget-based approaches in particular are now embedded not only in evaluation frameworks but also in the architectures of RAG systems themselves. While this integration can lead to genuine improvements, it also creates a risk of faulty measurements due to circularity. In this paper, we investigate this risk through comparative experiments with nugget-based RAG systems, including Ginger and Crucible, against strong baselines such as GPT-Researcher. By deliberately modifying Crucible to generate outputs optimized for an LLM judge, we show that near-perfect evaluation scores can be achieved when elements of the evaluation - such as prompt templates or gold nuggets - are leaked or can be predicted. Our results highlight the importance of blind evaluation settings and methodological diversity to guard against mistaking metric overfitting for genuine system progress.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

Auto-ARGUE: LLM-Based Report Generation Evaluation

Generation of citation-backed reports is a primary use case for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) systems. While open-source evaluation tools exist for various RAG tasks, tools designed for report generation are lacking. Accordingly, we introduce Auto-ARGUE, a robust LLM-based implementation of the recently proposed ARGUE framework for report generation evaluation. We present analysis of Auto-ARGUE on the report generation pilot task from the TREC 2024 NeuCLIR track and on two tasks from the TREC 2024 RAG track, showing good system-level correlations with human judgments. Additionally, we release ARGUE-Viz, a web app for visualization and fine-grained analysis of Auto-ARGUE judgments and scores.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

UNH at CheckThat! 2025: Fine-tuning Vs Prompting in Claim Extraction

We participate in CheckThat! Task 2 English and explore various methods of prompting and in-context learning, including few-shot prompting and fine-tuning with different LLM families, with the goal of extracting check-worthy claims from social media passages. Our best METEOR score is achieved by fine-tuning a FLAN-T5 model. However, we observe that higher-quality claims can sometimes be extracted using other methods, even when their METEOR scores are lower.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Does UMBRELA Work on Other LLMs?

We reproduce the UMBRELA LLM Judge evaluation framework across a range of large language models (LLMs) to assess its generalizability beyond the original study. Our investigation evaluates how LLM choice affects relevance assessment accuracy, focusing on leaderboard rank correlation and per-label agreement metrics. Results demonstrate that UMBRELA with DeepSeek V3 obtains very comparable performance to GPT-4o (used in original work). For LLaMA-3.3-70B we obtain slightly lower performance, which further degrades with smaller LLMs.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

Criteria-Based LLM Relevance Judgments

Relevance judgments are crucial for evaluating information retrieval systems, but traditional human-annotated labels are time-consuming and expensive. As a result, many researchers turn to automatic alternatives to accelerate method development. Among these, Large Language Models (LLMs) provide a scalable solution by generating relevance labels directly through prompting. However, prompting an LLM for a relevance label without constraints often results in not only incorrect predictions but also outputs that are difficult for humans to interpret. We propose the Multi-Criteria framework for LLM-based relevance judgments, decomposing the notion of relevance into multiple criteria--such as exactness, coverage, topicality, and contextual fit--to improve the robustness and interpretability of retrieval evaluations compared to direct grading methods. We validate this approach on three datasets: the TREC Deep Learning tracks from 2019 and 2020, as well as LLMJudge (based on TREC DL 2023). Our results demonstrate that Multi-Criteria judgments enhance the system ranking/leaderboard performance. Moreover, we highlight the strengths and limitations of this approach relative to direct grading approaches, offering insights that can guide the development of future automatic evaluation frameworks in information retrieval.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2025

LLM-Evaluation Tropes: Perspectives on the Validity of LLM-Evaluations

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used to evaluate information retrieval (IR) systems, generating relevance judgments traditionally made by human assessors. Recent empirical studies suggest that LLM-based evaluations often align with human judgments, leading some to suggest that human judges may no longer be necessary, while others highlight concerns about judgment reliability, validity, and long-term impact. As IR systems begin incorporating LLM-generated signals, evaluation outcomes risk becoming self-reinforcing, potentially leading to misleading conclusions. This paper examines scenarios where LLM-evaluators may falsely indicate success, particularly when LLM-based judgments influence both system development and evaluation. We highlight key risks, including bias reinforcement, reproducibility challenges, and inconsistencies in assessment methodologies. To address these concerns, we propose tests to quantify adverse effects, guardrails, and a collaborative framework for constructing reusable test collections that integrate LLM judgments responsibly. By providing perspectives from academia and industry, this work aims to establish best practices for the principled use of LLMs in IR evaluation.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

LLM-based relevance assessment still can't replace human relevance assessment

The use of large language models (LLMs) for relevance assessment in information retrieval has gained significant attention, with recent studies suggesting that LLM-based judgments provide comparable evaluations to human judgments. Notably, based on TREC 2024 data, Upadhyay et al make a bold claim that LLM-based relevance assessments, such as those generated by the Umbrela system, can fully replace traditional human relevance assessments in TREC-style evaluations. This paper critically examines this claim, highlighting practical and theoretical limitations that undermine the validity of this conclusion. First, we question whether the evidence provided by Upadhyay et al. genuinely supports their claim, particularly when the test collection is intended to serve as a benchmark for future research innovations.Second, we submit a system deliberately crafted to exploit automatic evaluation metrics, demonstrating that it can achieve artificially inflated scores without truly improving retrieval quality. Third, we simulate the consequences of circularity by analyzing Kendall's tau correlations under the hypothetical scenario in which all systems adopt Umbrela as a final-stage re-ranker, illustrating how reliance on LLM-based assessments can distort system rankings. Theoretical challenges - including the inherent narcissism of LLMs, the risk of overfitting to LLM-based metrics, and the potential degradation of future LLM performance - that must be addressed before LLM-based relevance assessments can be considered a viable replacement for human judgments.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

Best in Tau@LLMJudge: Criteria-Based Relevance Evaluation with Llama3

Traditional evaluation of information retrieval (IR) systems relies on human-annotated relevance labels, which can be both biased and costly at scale. In this context, large language models (LLMs) offer an alternative by allowing us to directly prompt them to assign relevance labels for passages associated with each query. In this study, we explore alternative methods to directly prompt LLMs for assigned relevance labels, by exploring two hypotheses: Hypothesis 1 assumes that it is helpful to break down "relevance" into specific criteria - exactness, coverage, topicality, and contextual fit. We explore different approaches that prompt large language models (LLMs) to obtain criteria-level grades for all passages, and we consider various ways to aggregate criteria-level grades into a relevance label. Hypothesis 2 assumes that differences in linguistic style between queries and passages may negatively impact the automatic relevance label prediction. We explore whether improvements can be achieved by first synthesizing a summary of the passage in the linguistic style of a query, and then using this summary in place of the passage to assess its relevance. We include an empirical evaluation of our approaches based on data from the LLMJudge challenge run in Summer 2024, where our "Four Prompts" approach obtained the highest scores in Kendall's tau.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

A Workbench for Autograding Retrieve/Generate Systems

This resource paper addresses the challenge of evaluating Information Retrieval (IR) systems in the era of autoregressive Large Language Models (LLMs). Traditional methods relying on passage-level judgments are no longer effective due to the diversity of responses generated by LLM-based systems. We provide a workbench to explore several alternative evaluation approaches to judge the relevance of a system's response that incorporate LLMs: 1. Asking an LLM whether the response is relevant; 2. Asking the LLM which set of nuggets (i.e., relevant key facts) is covered in the response; 3. Asking the LLM to answer a set of exam questions with the response. This workbench aims to facilitate the development of new, reusable test collections. Researchers can manually refine sets of nuggets and exam questions, observing their impact on system evaluation and leaderboard rankings. Resource available at https://github.com/TREMA-UNH/autograding-workbench

cs.IR↗

arXiv2024

An Exam-based Evaluation Approach Beyond Traditional Relevance Judgments

Current IR evaluation is based on relevance judgments, created either manually or automatically, with decisions outsourced to Large Language Models (LLMs). We offer an alternative paradigm, that never relies on relevance judgments in any form. Instead, a text is defined as relevant if it contains information that enables the answering of key questions. We use this idea to design the EXAM Answerability Metric to evaluate information retrieval/generation systems for their ability to provide topically relevant information. We envision the role of a human judge to edit and define an exam question bank that will test for the presence of relevant information in text. We support this step by generating an initial set of exam questions. In the next phase, an LLM-based question answering system will automatically grade system responses by tracking which exam questions are answerable with which system responses. We propose two evaluation measures, the recall-oriented EXAM Cover metric, and the precision-oriented EXAM Qrels metric, the latter which can be implemented with trec_eval. This paradigm not only allows for the expansion of the exam question set post-hoc but also facilitates the ongoing evaluation of future information systems, whether they focus on retrieval, generation, or both.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2023

Fine-grained Forecasting Models Via Gaussian Process Blurring Effect

Time series forecasting is a challenging task due to the existence of complex and dynamic temporal dependencies. This can lead to incorrect predictions by even the best forecasting models. Using more training data is one way to improve the accuracy, but this source is often limited. In contrast, we are building on successful denoising approaches for image generation by advocating for an end-to-end forecasting and denoising paradigm. We propose an end-to-end forecast-blur-denoise forecasting framework by encouraging a division of labors between the forecasting and the denoising models. The initial forecasting model is directed to focus on accurately predicting the coarse-grained behavior, while the denoiser model focuses on capturing the fine-grained behavior that is locally blurred by integrating a Gaussian Process model. All three parts are interacting for the best end-to-end performance. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed approach is able to improve the forecasting accuracy of several state-of-the-art forecasting models as well as several other denoising approaches.

cs.LG↗

arXiv2023

Perspectives on Large Language Models for Relevance Judgment

When asked, large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT claim that they can assist with relevance judgments but it is not clear whether automated judgments can reliably be used in evaluations of retrieval systems. In this perspectives paper, we discuss possible ways for LLMs to support relevance judgments along with concerns and issues that arise. We devise a human--machine collaboration spectrum that allows to categorize different relevance judgment strategies, based on how much humans rely on machines. For the extreme point of "fully automated judgments", we further include a pilot experiment on whether LLM-based relevance judgments correlate with judgments from trained human assessors. We conclude the paper by providing opposing perspectives for and against the use of~LLMs for automatic relevance judgments, and a compromise perspective, informed by our analyses of the literature, our preliminary experimental evidence, and our experience as IR researchers.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2023

Retrieve-Cluster-Summarize: An Alternative to End-to-End Training for Query-specific Article Generation

Query-specific article generation is the task of, given a search query, generate a single article that gives an overview of the topic. We envision such articles as an alternative to presenting a ranking of search results. While generative Large Language Models (LLMs) like chatGPT also address this task, they are known to hallucinate new information, their models are secret, hard to analyze and control. Some generative LLMs provide supporting references, yet these are often unrelated to the generated content. As an alternative, we propose to study article generation systems that integrate document retrieval, query-specific clustering, and summarization. By design, such models can provide actual citations as provenance for their generated text. In particular, we contribute an evaluation framework that allows to separately trains and evaluate each of these three components before combining them into one system. We experimentally demonstrate that a system comprised of the best-performing individual components also obtains the best F-1 overall system quality.

cs.IR↗