arXiv:2605.23362cs.LGcs.IT2026-05

用有限预算精准分配评估任务,让大模型评分更准更快。

Instance-Optimal Estimation with Multiple LLM Judges on a Budget

  • 根据法官成本与可靠性,动态分配评估任务以提升精度。
  • 在合成数据和HelpSteer2上,显著优于均匀分配的基准方法。
  • 适合需要高效、低成本模型评估的研究者或工程团队。

大型语言模型的评估越来越多依赖于‘大模型作裁判’的协议,但此类评估成本高昂:不同裁判价格与可靠性各异,每个提示-响应对的难度也差异显著。这引出一个核心问题:在固定预算下,如何在异质裁判与不同实例间分配评估请求,以获得最准确的评分估计?本文将此问题形式化为‘受限异方差多裁判估计’。给定 $K$ 个提示-响应对、$J$ 个已知成本的裁判及未知的查询-裁判方差,目标是在最小化 $\\\\\\_p$-误差的前提下估计有界得分向量。首先分析逆方差加权估计器(IVWE),推导出最优分配策略;由于该策略依赖未知方差,提出EST-IVWE算法,通过构建乐观偏倚的方差估计来稳定实际分配。证明该算法在预算范围内达到接近最优的误差率。第二项核心理论贡献是建立匹配的局部极小极大下界,证明所提算法的实例最优性。关键技术洞察是:传统Fano型高概率论证过于粗糙,会丢失影响最优分配的局部方差结构;本文采用基于局部扰动的Assouad型期望论证,保留结构并得到精确的依赖分配的下界。最后,在合成数据和HelpSteer2数据集上验证了所提方法优于朴素均匀分配。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Evaluating large language models increasingly relies on LLM-as-a-judge protocols, but such evaluations remain costly: different judges have different prices and reliabilities, and the difficulty of each prompt-response pair can vary substantially. This raises a basic allocation question: under a fixed budget, how should one distribute evaluation queries across heterogeneous judges and instances to obtain the most accurate score estimates? We formalize this question as *budgeted heteroskedastic multi-judge estimation*. Given $K$ prompt-response pairs, $J$ judges with known costs, and unknown query-judge variances, the goal is to estimate a bounded score vector while minimizing an $\ell_p$-error. Our first contribution is to analyze the inverse-variance weighted estimator (IVWE) and to derive the oracle allocation that minimizes its error rate. Since this allocation depends on the unknown variances, we then address the practical unknown-variance setting by proposing EST-IVWE, an adaptive algorithm that constructs and leverages *optimistically biased* variance estimates to stabilize the empirical allocation. We prove that EST-IVWE matches the oracle IVWE rate up to lower-order terms in the budget. Our second and central theoretical contribution is a matching *local* minimax lower bound, which establishes the instance-optimality of the proposed algorithms. A key technical insight is that Fano-type high-probability arguments are too coarse for this problem: their packing construction loses the local variance structure that governs the optimal allocation. We instead use an Assouad-type in-expectation argument, based on local perturbations, which preserves this structure and yields the sharp allocation-dependent lower bound. Finally, we numerically validate the superiority of our approach over naïve uniform allocation on synthetic and HelpSteer2 datasets.

模型评估多裁判预算优化

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