Daily Papers

Automatic Readability Assessment (ARA), the task of assigning a reading level to a text, is traditionally treated as a classification problem in NLP research. In this paper, we propose the first neural, pairwise ranking approach to ARA and compare it with existing classification, regression, and (non-neural) ranking methods. We establish the performance of our model by conducting experiments with three English, one French and one Spanish datasets. We demonstrate that our approach performs well in monolingual single/cross corpus testing scenarios and achieves a zero-shot cross-lingual ranking accuracy of over 80% for both French and Spanish when trained on English data. Additionally, we also release a new parallel bilingual readability dataset in English and French. To our knowledge, this paper proposes the first neural pairwise ranking model for ARA, and shows the first results of cross-lingual, zero-shot evaluation of ARA with neural models.

LLM-as-judge evaluation has become the de facto standard for scaling model assessment, but the practice is statistically unsound: uncalibrated scores can invert preferences, naive confidence intervals on uncalibrated scores achieve near-0% coverage, and importance-weighted estimators collapse under limited overlap despite high effective sample size (ESS). We introduce Causal Judge Evaluation (CJE), a framework that fixes all three failures. On n=4,961 Chatbot Arena prompts (after filtering from 5k), CJE achieves 99% pairwise ranking accuracy at full sample size (94% averaged across configurations), matching oracle quality, at 14x lower cost (for ranking 5 policies) by calibrating a 16x cheaper judge on just 5% oracle labels (~250 labels). CJE combines three components: (i) AutoCal-R, reward calibration via mean-preserving isotonic regression; (ii) SIMCal-W, weight stabilization via stacking of S-monotone candidates; and (iii) Oracle-Uncertainty Aware (OUA) inference that propagates calibration uncertainty into confidence intervals. We formalize the Coverage-Limited Efficiency (CLE) diagnostic, which explains why IPS-style estimators fail even when ESS exceeds 90%: the logger rarely visits regions where target policies concentrate. Key findings: SNIPS inverts rankings even with reward calibration (38% pairwise, negative Kendall's tau) due to weight instability; calibrated IPS remains near-random (47%) despite weight stabilization, consistent with CLE; OUA improves coverage from near-0% to ~86% (Direct) and ~96% (stacked-DR), where naive intervals severely under-cover.

Ranking passages by prompting a large language model (LLM) can achieve promising performance in modern information retrieval (IR) systems. A common approach is to sort the ranking list by prompting LLMs for pairwise comparison. However, sorting-based methods require consistent comparisons to correctly sort the passages, which we show that LLMs often violate. We identify two kinds of intrinsic inconsistency in LLM-based pairwise comparisons: order inconsistency which leads to conflicting results when switching the passage order, and transitive inconsistency which leads to non-transitive triads among all preference pairs. In this paper, we propose LLM-RankFusion, an LLM-based ranking framework that mitigates these inconsistencies and produces a robust ranking list. LLM-RankFusion mitigates order inconsistency using in-context learning (ICL) to demonstrate order-agnostic comparisons and calibration to estimate the underlying preference probability between two passages. We then address transitive inconsistency by aggregating the ranking results from multiple rankers. In our experiments, we empirically show that LLM-RankFusion can significantly reduce inconsistent pairwise comparison results, and improve the ranking quality by making the final ranking list more robust.

As centralized AI hits compute ceilings and diminishing returns from ever-larger training runs, meeting demand requires an inference layer that scales horizontally in both capacity and capability. We present Fortytwo, a novel protocol that leverages swarm intelligence principles and distributed pairwise ranking consensus to achieve superior performance in AI inference. Our approach reimagines collaboration among AI nodes using swarm inference: a peer-ranked, reputation-weighted consensus across heterogeneous models that surfaces the highest-quality responses. Using pairwise ranking with a custom Bradley-Terry-style aggregation model, we demonstrate that swarm inference substantially outperforms majority voting, achieving 85.90% on GPQA Diamond versus 68.69% for majority voting with the same model set - an improvement of +17.21 percentage points (approximately +25.1% relative). The protocol incorporates on-chain reputation so node influence adapts to demonstrated accuracy over time, yielding a meritocratic consensus that filters low-quality or malicious participants. To resist Sybil attacks, Fortytwo employs proof-of-capability in its consensus: nodes must successfully complete calibration/test requests and stake reputation to enter ranking rounds, making multi-identity attacks economically unattractive while preserving openness. Across six challenging benchmarks, including GPQA Diamond, LiveCodeBench, and AIME, our evaluation indicates higher accuracy and strong resilience to adversarial and noisy free-form prompting (e.g., prompt-injection degradation of only 0.12% versus 6.20% for a monolithic single-model baseline), while retaining practical deployability. Together, these results establish a foundation for decentralized AI systems - democratizing access to high-quality inference through collective intelligence without sacrificing reliability or security.

Automatic evaluation benchmarks such as MT-Bench, Arena-Hard, and Auto-Arena are seeing growing adoption for the evaluation of Large Language Models (LLMs). Existing research has primarily focused on approximating human-based model rankings using limited data and LLM-as-a-Judge. However, the fundamental premise of these studies, which attempts to replicate human rankings, is flawed. Specifically, these benchmarks typically offer only overall scores, limiting their utility to leaderboard rankings, rather than providing feedback that can guide model optimization and support model profiling. Therefore, we advocate for an evaluation paradigm shift from approximating human-based model rankings to providing feedback with analytical value. To this end, we introduce Feedbacker, an evaluation framework that provides comprehensive and fine-grained results, thereby enabling thorough identification of a model's specific strengths and weaknesses. Such feedback not only supports the targeted optimization of the model but also enhances the understanding of its behavior. Feedbacker comprises three key components: an extensible tree-based query taxonomy builder, an automated query synthesis scheme, and a suite of visualization and analysis tools. Furthermore, we propose a novel LLM-as-a-Judge method: PC2 (Pre-Comparison-derived Criteria) pointwise evaluation. This method derives evaluation criteria by pre-comparing the differences between several auxiliary responses, achieving the accuracy of pairwise evaluation while maintaining the time complexity of pointwise evaluation. Finally, leveraging the evaluation results of 17 mainstream LLMs, we demonstrate the usage of Feedbacker and highlight its effectiveness and potential. Our homepage project is available at https://liudan193.github.io/Feedbacker.