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Judging with Many Minds: Do More Perspectives Mean Less Prejudice? On Bias Amplifications and Resistance in Multi-Agent Based LLM-as-Judge

Ma, Chiyu, Zhang, Enpei, Zhao, Yilun, Liu, Wenjun, Jia, Yaning, Qing, Peijun, Shi, Lin, Cohan, Arman, Yan, Yujun, Vosoughi, Soroush

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

LLM-as-Judge has emerged as a scalable alternative to human evaluation, enabling large language models (LLMs) to provide reward signals in trainings. While recent work has explored multi-agent extensions such as multi-agent debate and meta-judging to enhance evaluation quality, the question of how intrinsic biases manifest in these settings remains underexplored. In this study, we conduct a systematic analysis of four diverse bias types: position bias, verbosity bias, chain-of-thought bias, and bandwagon bias. We evaluate these biases across two widely adopted multi-agent LLM-as-Judge frameworks: Multi-Agent-Debate and LLM-as-Meta-Judge. Our results show that debate framework amplifies biases sharply after the initial debate, and this increased bias is sustained in subsequent rounds, while meta-judge approaches exhibit greater resistance. We further investigate the incorporation of PINE, a leading single-agent debiasing method, as a bias-free agent within these systems. The results reveal that this bias-free agent effectively reduces biases in debate settings but provides less benefit in meta-judge scenarios. Our work provides a comprehensive study of bias behavior in multi-agent LLM-as-Judge systems and highlights the need for targeted bias mitigation strategies in collaborative evaluation settings.


Fragile Preferences: A Deep Dive Into Order Effects in Large Language Models

Yin, Haonan, Vardi, Shai, Choudhary, Vidyanand

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed in decision-support systems for high-stakes domains such as hiring and university admissions, where choices often involve selecting among competing alternatives. While prior work has noted position order biases in LLM-driven comparisons, these biases have not been systematically analyzed or linked to underlying preference structures. We present the first comprehensive study of position biases across multiple LLMs and two distinct domains: resume comparisons, representing a realistic high-stakes context, and color selection, which isolates position effects by removing confounding factors. We find strong and consistent order effects, including a quality-dependent shift: when all options are high quality, models favor the first option, but when quality is lower, they favor later options. We also identify two previously undocumented biases in both human and machine decision-making: a centrality bias (favoring the middle position in triplewise comparisons) and a name bias, where certain names are favored despite controlling for demographic signals. To separate superficial tie-breaking from genuine distortions of judgment, we extend the rational choice framework to classify pairwise preferences as robust, fragile, or indifferent. Using this framework, we show that order effects can lead models to select strictly inferior options, and that position biases are typically stronger than gender biases. These results indicate that LLMs exhibit distinct failure modes not documented in human decision-making. We also propose targeted mitigation strategies, including a novel use of the temperature parameter, to recover underlying preferences when order effects distort model behavior.


SCOPE: Stochastic and Counterbiased Option Placement for Evaluating Large Language Models

Jeong, Wonjun, Kim, Dongseok, Whangbo, Taegkeun

arXiv.org Artificial Intelligence

Large Language Models (LLMs) can achieve inflated scores on multiple-choice tasks by exploiting inherent biases in option positions or labels, rather than demonstrating genuine understanding. This study introduces SCOPE, an evaluation framework designed to measure and mitigate such selection bias in a dataset-independent manner. By repeatedly invoking a null prompt that lacks semantic content, SCOPE estimates each model's unique position-bias distribution. It then redistributes the answer slot according to the inverse-bias distribution, thereby equalizing the lucky-rate, the probability of selecting the correct answer by chance. Furthermore, it prevents semantically similar distractors from being placed adjacent to the answer, thereby blocking near-miss guesses based on superficial proximity cues. Across multiple benchmark experiments, SCOPE consistently outperformed existing debiasing methods in terms of stable performance improvements and showed clearer confidence distributions over correct options. This framework thus offers a new standard for enhancing the fairness and reliability of LLM evaluations.