AI Judges in Design: Statistical Perspectives on Achieving Human Expert Equivalence With Vision-Language Models
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arXiv
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| Autores principales: | , , , |
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| Formato: | Preprint |
| Publicado: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866916669968875520 |
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| author | Edwards, Kristen M. Tehranchi, Farnaz Miller, Scarlett R. Ahmed, Faez |
| author_facet | Edwards, Kristen M. Tehranchi, Farnaz Miller, Scarlett R. Ahmed, Faez |
| contents | The subjective evaluation of early stage engineering designs, such as conceptual sketches, traditionally relies on human experts. However, expert evaluations are time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes inconsistent. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) offer the potential to automate design assessments, but it is crucial to ensure that these AI ``judges'' perform on par with human experts. However, no existing framework assesses expert equivalence. This paper introduces a rigorous statistical framework to determine whether an AI judge's ratings match those of human experts. We apply this framework in a case study evaluating four VLM-based judges on key design metrics (uniqueness, creativity, usefulness, and drawing quality). These AI judges employ various in-context learning (ICL) techniques, including uni- vs. multimodal prompts and inference-time reasoning. The same statistical framework is used to assess three trained novices for expert-equivalence. Results show that the top-performing AI judge, using text- and image-based ICL with reasoning, achieves expert-level agreement for uniqueness and drawing quality and outperforms or matches trained novices across all metrics. In 6/6 runs for both uniqueness and creativity, and 5/6 runs for both drawing quality and usefulness, its agreement with experts meets or exceeds that of the majority of trained novices. These findings suggest that reasoning-supported VLM models can achieve human-expert equivalence in design evaluation. This has implications for scaling design evaluation in education and practice, and provides a general statistical framework for validating AI judges in other domains requiring subjective content evaluation. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_00938 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | AI Judges in Design: Statistical Perspectives on Achieving Human Expert Equivalence With Vision-Language Models Edwards, Kristen M. Tehranchi, Farnaz Miller, Scarlett R. Ahmed, Faez Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning The subjective evaluation of early stage engineering designs, such as conceptual sketches, traditionally relies on human experts. However, expert evaluations are time-consuming, expensive, and sometimes inconsistent. Recent advances in vision-language models (VLMs) offer the potential to automate design assessments, but it is crucial to ensure that these AI ``judges'' perform on par with human experts. However, no existing framework assesses expert equivalence. This paper introduces a rigorous statistical framework to determine whether an AI judge's ratings match those of human experts. We apply this framework in a case study evaluating four VLM-based judges on key design metrics (uniqueness, creativity, usefulness, and drawing quality). These AI judges employ various in-context learning (ICL) techniques, including uni- vs. multimodal prompts and inference-time reasoning. The same statistical framework is used to assess three trained novices for expert-equivalence. Results show that the top-performing AI judge, using text- and image-based ICL with reasoning, achieves expert-level agreement for uniqueness and drawing quality and outperforms or matches trained novices across all metrics. In 6/6 runs for both uniqueness and creativity, and 5/6 runs for both drawing quality and usefulness, its agreement with experts meets or exceeds that of the majority of trained novices. These findings suggest that reasoning-supported VLM models can achieve human-expert equivalence in design evaluation. This has implications for scaling design evaluation in education and practice, and provides a general statistical framework for validating AI judges in other domains requiring subjective content evaluation. |
| title | AI Judges in Design: Statistical Perspectives on Achieving Human Expert Equivalence With Vision-Language Models |
| topic | Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.00938 |