Enregistré dans:
Détails bibliographiques
Auteurs principaux: Sun, Diege, Chen, Guanyi, Fan, Zhao, Cheng, Xiaorong, He, Tingting
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
Sujets:
Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05142
Tags: Ajouter un tag
Pas de tags, Soyez le premier à ajouter un tag!
_version_ 1866913884678389760
author Sun, Diege
Chen, Guanyi
Fan, Zhao
Cheng, Xiaorong
He, Tingting
author_facet Sun, Diege
Chen, Guanyi
Fan, Zhao
Cheng, Xiaorong
He, Tingting
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automated evaluators in natural language generation, yet it remains unclear whether they can accurately replicate human judgments of error severity. In this study, we systematically compare human and LLM assessments of image descriptions containing controlled semantic errors. We extend the experimental framework of van Miltenburg et al. (2020) to both unimodal (text-only) and multimodal (text + image) settings, evaluating four error types: age, gender, clothing type, and clothing colour. Our findings reveal that humans assign varying levels of severity to different error types, with visual context significantly amplifying perceived severity for colour and type errors. Notably, most LLMs assign low scores to gender errors but disproportionately high scores to colour errors, unlike humans, who judge both as highly severe but for different reasons. This suggests that these models may have internalised social norms influencing gender judgments but lack the perceptual grounding to emulate human sensitivity to colour, which is shaped by distinct neural mechanisms. Only one of the evaluated LLMs, Doubao, replicates the human-like ranking of error severity, but it fails to distinguish between error types as clearly as humans. Surprisingly, DeepSeek-V3, a unimodal LLM, achieves the highest alignment with human judgments across both unimodal and multimodal conditions, outperforming even state-of-the-art multimodal models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_05142
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Do Large Language Models Judge Error Severity Like Humans?
Sun, Diege
Chen, Guanyi
Fan, Zhao
Cheng, Xiaorong
He, Tingting
Computation and Language
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automated evaluators in natural language generation, yet it remains unclear whether they can accurately replicate human judgments of error severity. In this study, we systematically compare human and LLM assessments of image descriptions containing controlled semantic errors. We extend the experimental framework of van Miltenburg et al. (2020) to both unimodal (text-only) and multimodal (text + image) settings, evaluating four error types: age, gender, clothing type, and clothing colour. Our findings reveal that humans assign varying levels of severity to different error types, with visual context significantly amplifying perceived severity for colour and type errors. Notably, most LLMs assign low scores to gender errors but disproportionately high scores to colour errors, unlike humans, who judge both as highly severe but for different reasons. This suggests that these models may have internalised social norms influencing gender judgments but lack the perceptual grounding to emulate human sensitivity to colour, which is shaped by distinct neural mechanisms. Only one of the evaluated LLMs, Doubao, replicates the human-like ranking of error severity, but it fails to distinguish between error types as clearly as humans. Surprisingly, DeepSeek-V3, a unimodal LLM, achieves the highest alignment with human judgments across both unimodal and multimodal conditions, outperforming even state-of-the-art multimodal models.
title Do Large Language Models Judge Error Severity Like Humans?
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.05142