RoSE: Round-robin Synthetic Data Evaluation for Selecting LLM Generators without Human Test Sets

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Hauptverfasser: Cegin, Jan, Pecher, Branislav, Srba, Ivan, Simko, Jakub
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Cegin, Jan
Pecher, Branislav
Srba, Ivan
Simko, Jakub
author_facet Cegin, Jan
Pecher, Branislav
Srba, Ivan
Simko, Jakub
contents LLMs are powerful generators of synthetic data, which are used for training smaller, specific models. This is especially valuable for low-resource languages, where human-labelled data is scarce but LLMs can still produce high-quality text. However, LLMs differ in how useful their outputs are for training. Selecting the best LLM as a generator is challenging because extrinsic evaluation requires costly human annotations (which are often unavailable for low-resource languages), while intrinsic metrics correlate poorly with downstream performance. We introduce Round robin Synthetic data Evaluation (RoSE), a proxy metric for selecting the best LLM generator without human test sets. RoSE trains a small model on the outputs of a candidate generator (LLM) and then evaluates it on generated synthetic examples from all other candidate LLMs. The final RoSE score is the mean performance of this small model. Across six LLMs, eleven languages, and three tasks (sentiment, topic, intent), RoSE identifies the optimal generator more often than any other intrinsic heuristics. RoSE outperforms intrinsic heuristics and comes within 0.76 percentage points of the optimal generator baseline. This result is measured in terms of downstream performance, obtained by training a small model on the chosen generator's outputs (optimal vs. proxy metric selected) and evaluating it on human-labelled test data. Additionally, RoSE is the only metric to achieve a positive correlation with performance on human test data.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2510_06143
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle RoSE: Round-robin Synthetic Data Evaluation for Selecting LLM Generators without Human Test Sets
Cegin, Jan
Pecher, Branislav
Srba, Ivan
Simko, Jakub
Computation and Language
LLMs are powerful generators of synthetic data, which are used for training smaller, specific models. This is especially valuable for low-resource languages, where human-labelled data is scarce but LLMs can still produce high-quality text. However, LLMs differ in how useful their outputs are for training. Selecting the best LLM as a generator is challenging because extrinsic evaluation requires costly human annotations (which are often unavailable for low-resource languages), while intrinsic metrics correlate poorly with downstream performance. We introduce Round robin Synthetic data Evaluation (RoSE), a proxy metric for selecting the best LLM generator without human test sets. RoSE trains a small model on the outputs of a candidate generator (LLM) and then evaluates it on generated synthetic examples from all other candidate LLMs. The final RoSE score is the mean performance of this small model. Across six LLMs, eleven languages, and three tasks (sentiment, topic, intent), RoSE identifies the optimal generator more often than any other intrinsic heuristics. RoSE outperforms intrinsic heuristics and comes within 0.76 percentage points of the optimal generator baseline. This result is measured in terms of downstream performance, obtained by training a small model on the chosen generator's outputs (optimal vs. proxy metric selected) and evaluating it on human-labelled test data. Additionally, RoSE is the only metric to achieve a positive correlation with performance on human test data.
title RoSE: Round-robin Synthetic Data Evaluation for Selecting LLM Generators without Human Test Sets
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06143