Beyond Pointwise Scores: Decomposed Criteria-Based Evaluation of LLM Responses

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Yu, Fangyi, Seedat, Nabeel, Herrmannova, Dasha, Schilder, Frank, Schwarz, Jonathan Richard
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Yu, Fangyi
Seedat, Nabeel
Herrmannova, Dasha
Schilder, Frank
Schwarz, Jonathan Richard
author_facet Yu, Fangyi
Seedat, Nabeel
Herrmannova, Dasha
Schilder, Frank
Schwarz, Jonathan Richard
contents Evaluating long-form answers in high-stakes domains such as law or medicine remains a fundamental challenge. Standard metrics like BLEU and ROUGE fail to capture semantic correctness, and current LLM-based evaluators often reduce nuanced aspects of answer quality into a single undifferentiated score. We introduce DeCE, a decomposed LLM evaluation framework that separates precision (factual accuracy and relevance) and recall (coverage of required concepts), using instance-specific criteria automatically extracted from gold answer requirements. DeCE is model-agnostic and domain-general, requiring no predefined taxonomies or handcrafted rubrics. We instantiate DeCE to evaluate different LLMs on a real-world legal QA task involving multi-jurisdictional reasoning and citation grounding. DeCE achieves substantially stronger correlation with expert judgments ($r=0.78$), compared to traditional metrics ($r=0.12$), pointwise LLM scoring ($r=0.35$), and modern multidimensional evaluators ($r=0.48$). It also reveals interpretable trade-offs: generalist models favor recall, while specialized models favor precision. Importantly, only 11.95% of LLM-generated criteria required expert revision, underscoring DeCE's scalability. DeCE offers an interpretable and actionable LLM evaluation framework in expert domains.
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publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Beyond Pointwise Scores: Decomposed Criteria-Based Evaluation of LLM Responses
Yu, Fangyi
Seedat, Nabeel
Herrmannova, Dasha
Schilder, Frank
Schwarz, Jonathan Richard
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Evaluating long-form answers in high-stakes domains such as law or medicine remains a fundamental challenge. Standard metrics like BLEU and ROUGE fail to capture semantic correctness, and current LLM-based evaluators often reduce nuanced aspects of answer quality into a single undifferentiated score. We introduce DeCE, a decomposed LLM evaluation framework that separates precision (factual accuracy and relevance) and recall (coverage of required concepts), using instance-specific criteria automatically extracted from gold answer requirements. DeCE is model-agnostic and domain-general, requiring no predefined taxonomies or handcrafted rubrics. We instantiate DeCE to evaluate different LLMs on a real-world legal QA task involving multi-jurisdictional reasoning and citation grounding. DeCE achieves substantially stronger correlation with expert judgments ($r=0.78$), compared to traditional metrics ($r=0.12$), pointwise LLM scoring ($r=0.35$), and modern multidimensional evaluators ($r=0.48$). It also reveals interpretable trade-offs: generalist models favor recall, while specialized models favor precision. Importantly, only 11.95% of LLM-generated criteria required expert revision, underscoring DeCE's scalability. DeCE offers an interpretable and actionable LLM evaluation framework in expert domains.
title Beyond Pointwise Scores: Decomposed Criteria-Based Evaluation of LLM Responses
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.16093