SLMEval: Entropy-Based Calibration for Human-Aligned Evaluation of Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Daynauth, Roland, Clarke, Christopher, Flautner, Krisztian, Tang, Lingjia, Mars, Jason
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Daynauth, Roland
Clarke, Christopher
Flautner, Krisztian
Tang, Lingjia
Mars, Jason
author_facet Daynauth, Roland
Clarke, Christopher
Flautner, Krisztian
Tang, Lingjia
Mars, Jason
contents The LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm offers a scalable, reference-free approach for evaluating language models. Although several calibration techniques have been proposed to better align these evaluators with human judgment, prior studies focus primarily on narrow, well-structured benchmarks. As a result, it remains unclear whether such calibrations generalize to real-world, open-ended tasks. In this work, we show that SOTA calibrated evaluators often fail in these settings, exhibiting weak or even negative correlation with human judgments. To address this, we propose SLMEval, a novel and efficient calibration method based on entropy maximization over a small amount of human preference data. By estimating a latent distribution over model quality and reweighting evaluator scores accordingly, SLMEval achieves strong correlation with human evaluations across two real-world production use cases and the public benchmark. For example, on one such task, SLMEval achieves a Spearman correlation of 0.57 with human judgments, while G-Eval yields a negative correlation. In addition, SLMEval reduces evaluation costs by 5-30x compared to GPT-4-based calibrated evaluators such as G-eval.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_16003
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SLMEval: Entropy-Based Calibration for Human-Aligned Evaluation of Large Language Models
Daynauth, Roland
Clarke, Christopher
Flautner, Krisztian
Tang, Lingjia
Mars, Jason
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The LLM-as-a-Judge paradigm offers a scalable, reference-free approach for evaluating language models. Although several calibration techniques have been proposed to better align these evaluators with human judgment, prior studies focus primarily on narrow, well-structured benchmarks. As a result, it remains unclear whether such calibrations generalize to real-world, open-ended tasks. In this work, we show that SOTA calibrated evaluators often fail in these settings, exhibiting weak or even negative correlation with human judgments. To address this, we propose SLMEval, a novel and efficient calibration method based on entropy maximization over a small amount of human preference data. By estimating a latent distribution over model quality and reweighting evaluator scores accordingly, SLMEval achieves strong correlation with human evaluations across two real-world production use cases and the public benchmark. For example, on one such task, SLMEval achieves a Spearman correlation of 0.57 with human judgments, while G-Eval yields a negative correlation. In addition, SLMEval reduces evaluation costs by 5-30x compared to GPT-4-based calibrated evaluators such as G-eval.
title SLMEval: Entropy-Based Calibration for Human-Aligned Evaluation of Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.16003