Are LLM Evaluators Really Narcissists? Sanity Checking Self-Preference Evaluations
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arXiv
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| Main Authors: | , , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| _version_ | 1866915793882578944 |
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| author | Roytburg, Dani Bozoukov, Matthew Nguyen, Matthew Barzdukas, Jou Puig-Hall, Mackenzie Oozeer, Narmeen |
| author_facet | Roytburg, Dani Bozoukov, Matthew Nguyen, Matthew Barzdukas, Jou Puig-Hall, Mackenzie Oozeer, Narmeen |
| contents | Recent research has shown that large language models (LLMs) favor their own outputs when acting as judges, undermining the integrity of automated post-training and evaluation workflows. However, it is difficult to disentangle which evaluation biases are explained by narcissism versus general experimental confounds, distorting measurements of self-preference bias. We discover a core methodological confound which could reduce measurement error by 89.6%. Specifically, LLM evaluators may deliver self-preferring verdicts when the judge responds to queries which they completed incorrectly themselves; this would be true regardless of whether one of their responses is their own. To decouple self-preference signals from noisy outputs on hard problems, we introduce an Evaluator Quality Baseline, which compares the probability that a judge incorrectly votes for itself against the probability that it votes for an incorrect response from another model. Evaluating this simple baseline on 37,448 queries, only 51% of initial findings retain statistical significance. Finally, we turn towards characterizing the entropy of "easy" versus "hard" evaluation votes from LLM judges. Our corrective baseline enables future research on self-preference by eliminating noisy data from potential solutions. More widely, this work contributes to the growing body of work on cataloging and isolating judge-bias effects. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2601_22548 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Are LLM Evaluators Really Narcissists? Sanity Checking Self-Preference Evaluations Roytburg, Dani Bozoukov, Matthew Nguyen, Matthew Barzdukas, Jou Puig-Hall, Mackenzie Oozeer, Narmeen Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning Recent research has shown that large language models (LLMs) favor their own outputs when acting as judges, undermining the integrity of automated post-training and evaluation workflows. However, it is difficult to disentangle which evaluation biases are explained by narcissism versus general experimental confounds, distorting measurements of self-preference bias. We discover a core methodological confound which could reduce measurement error by 89.6%. Specifically, LLM evaluators may deliver self-preferring verdicts when the judge responds to queries which they completed incorrectly themselves; this would be true regardless of whether one of their responses is their own. To decouple self-preference signals from noisy outputs on hard problems, we introduce an Evaluator Quality Baseline, which compares the probability that a judge incorrectly votes for itself against the probability that it votes for an incorrect response from another model. Evaluating this simple baseline on 37,448 queries, only 51% of initial findings retain statistical significance. Finally, we turn towards characterizing the entropy of "easy" versus "hard" evaluation votes from LLM judges. Our corrective baseline enables future research on self-preference by eliminating noisy data from potential solutions. More widely, this work contributes to the growing body of work on cataloging and isolating judge-bias effects. |
| title | Are LLM Evaluators Really Narcissists? Sanity Checking Self-Preference Evaluations |
| topic | Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.22548 |