Evaluating Judges as Evaluators: The JETTS Benchmark of LLM-as-Judges as Test-Time Scaling Evaluators

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Main Authors: Zhou, Yilun, Xu, Austin, Wang, Peifeng, Xiong, Caiming, Joty, Shafiq
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Zhou, Yilun
Xu, Austin
Wang, Peifeng
Xiong, Caiming
Joty, Shafiq
author_facet Zhou, Yilun
Xu, Austin
Wang, Peifeng
Xiong, Caiming
Joty, Shafiq
contents Scaling test-time computation, or affording a generator large language model (LLM) extra compute during inference, typically employs the help of external non-generative evaluators (i.e., reward models). Concurrently, LLM-judges, models trained to generate evaluations and critiques (explanations) in natural language, are becoming increasingly popular in automatic evaluation. Despite judge empirical successes, their effectiveness as evaluators in test-time scaling settings is largely unknown. In this paper, we introduce the Judge Evaluation for Test-Time Scaling (JETTS) benchmark, which evaluates judge performance in three domains (math reasoning, code generation, and instruction following) under three task settings: response reranking, step-level beam search, and critique-based response refinement. We evaluate 10 different judge models (7B-70B parameters) for 8 different base generator models (6.7B-72B parameters). Our benchmark shows that while judges are competitive with outcome reward models in reranking, they are consistently worse than process reward models in beam search procedures. Furthermore, though unique to LLM-judges, their natural language critiques are currently ineffective in guiding the generator towards better responses.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_15253
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating Judges as Evaluators: The JETTS Benchmark of LLM-as-Judges as Test-Time Scaling Evaluators
Zhou, Yilun
Xu, Austin
Wang, Peifeng
Xiong, Caiming
Joty, Shafiq
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Scaling test-time computation, or affording a generator large language model (LLM) extra compute during inference, typically employs the help of external non-generative evaluators (i.e., reward models). Concurrently, LLM-judges, models trained to generate evaluations and critiques (explanations) in natural language, are becoming increasingly popular in automatic evaluation. Despite judge empirical successes, their effectiveness as evaluators in test-time scaling settings is largely unknown. In this paper, we introduce the Judge Evaluation for Test-Time Scaling (JETTS) benchmark, which evaluates judge performance in three domains (math reasoning, code generation, and instruction following) under three task settings: response reranking, step-level beam search, and critique-based response refinement. We evaluate 10 different judge models (7B-70B parameters) for 8 different base generator models (6.7B-72B parameters). Our benchmark shows that while judges are competitive with outcome reward models in reranking, they are consistently worse than process reward models in beam search procedures. Furthermore, though unique to LLM-judges, their natural language critiques are currently ineffective in guiding the generator towards better responses.
title Evaluating Judges as Evaluators: The JETTS Benchmark of LLM-as-Judges as Test-Time Scaling Evaluators
topic Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.15253