用大模型当评分员,让推荐系统评估更可靠。
From IR to RecSys: Evaluating LLM-based Judges in Cranfield-style Recommendation Collections
- 用大模型自动判断推荐相关性,替代人工标注。
- 大模型评分与人类评分一致度高,系统排名误差小。
- 适合用于模型对比和工业级推荐系统选型。
Cranfield 评价范式在信息检索中长期提供可靠、可复现的评估,近期研究开始将其扩展至推荐系统。近年来,大型语言模型(LLMs)作为自动相关性评判者,在查询-文档对上表现出与人工评估者良好的一致性。但这一方法是否适用于主观性强、依赖用户画像的推荐任务尚不明确。本文通过在基于Cranfield风格的推荐数据集ML-32M-ext上系统评估,发现传统训练-测试划分导致相关性标签不完整且系统排名不可靠。相比之下,采用池化策略可显著提升评估质量。研究显示,更丰富的物品元数据和更长的用户历史能提升大模型与人工标签的一致性,尽管个体项评分一致性仅为中等。但由大模型评分生成的系统排名与人工排名高度一致(nDCG@100下肯德尔等级相关系数最高达0.92,覆盖52种系统配置),媲美TREC检索任务表现。关键的是,大模型能纠正传统评估中因标签缺失造成的系统排名扭曲,准确识别被低估或高估的系统。工业级播客推荐案例进一步验证其实际价值。结论表明,大模型评判者不应取代人工或交互式评估,而应作为有力补充:虽然单个项目评分一致性中等,但聚合多对用户-物品评分后的系统排名仍具稳定性。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
The Cranfield paradigm has long provided reliable, reproducible evaluation in ad hoc retrieval, and recent work has begun extending this framework to recommender systems. A recent development in IR is the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) as automatic relevance judges, showing promising agreement with human assessors. Whether this LLM-judge paradigm---studied predominantly on query--document pairs---transfers to the subjective, profile-driven nature of recommendation remains an open question. This paper bridges the IR and RecSys evaluation traditions by systematically investigating LLM-based judges within a Cranfield-style recommendation collection. Using the ML-32M-ext movie recommendation collection, we first demonstrate that traditional train--test splits yield substantially incomplete relevance labels and unreliable system rankings compared to Cranfield-style pooling. We then assess LLM-judge alignment with human labels, finding that richer item metadata and longer user histories improve agreement, although item-level agreement remains moderate overall. Rankings derived from LLM-judge labels achieve high agreement with human-based rankings (Kendall's tau up to 0.92 for nDCG@100 across 52 system configurations), comparable to values reported for TREC ad hoc retrieval collections. Crucially, LLM-judge recovers system rankings that are distorted under traditional evaluation---correctly identifying systems that are undervalued or overvalued by incomplete labels. An industrial case study in podcast recommendation further demonstrates the practical value of LLM-judge for model selection. Rather than positioning LLM-judges as a replacement for human or interaction-based evaluation, our results support their use as a promising complementary signal: item-level agreement with humans is moderate, yet system-level rankings---which aggregate judgments over many user--item pairs---remain stable.
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