Can LLMs Replace Human Evaluators? An Empirical Study of LLM-as-a-Judge in Software Engineering

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2502.06193v1
• Date: Mon, 10 Feb 2025 06:49:29 GMT
• Title: Can LLMs Replace Human Evaluators? An Empirical Study of LLM-as-a-Judge in Software Engineering
• Authors: Ruiqi Wang, Jiyu Guo, Cuiyun Gao, Guodong Fan, Chun Yong Chong, Xin Xia,
• Abstract summary: Large language models (LLMs) have been deployed to tackle various software engineering (SE) tasks like code generation. Pass@k metric requires extensive unit tests and configured environments, and is not suitable for evaluating LLM-generated text. Conventional metrics like BLEU, which measure only lexical rather than semantic similarity, have also come under scrutiny.
• Score: 18.766132076075365
• License:
• Abstract: Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been deployed to tackle various software engineering (SE) tasks like code generation, significantly advancing the automation of SE tasks. However, assessing the quality of these LLM-generated code and text remains challenging. The commonly used Pass@k metric necessitates extensive unit tests and configured environments, demands a high labor cost, and is not suitable for evaluating LLM-generated text. Conventional metrics like BLEU, which measure only lexical rather than semantic similarity, have also come under scrutiny. In response, a new trend has emerged to employ LLMs for automated evaluation, known as LLM-as-a-judge. These LLM-as-a-judge methods are claimed to better mimic human assessment than conventional metrics without relying on high-quality reference answers. Nevertheless, their exact human alignment in SE tasks remains unexplored. In this paper, we empirically explore LLM-as-a-judge methods for evaluating SE tasks, focusing on their alignment with human judgments. We select seven LLM-as-a-judge methods that utilize general-purpose LLMs, alongside two LLMs specifically fine-tuned for evaluation. After generating and manually scoring LLM responses on three recent SE datasets of code translation, code generation, and code summarization, we then prompt these methods to evaluate each response. Finally, we compare the scores generated by these methods with human evaluation. The results indicate that output-based methods reach the highest Pearson correlation of 81.32 and 68.51 with human scores in code translation and generation, achieving near-human evaluation, noticeably outperforming ChrF++, one of the best conventional metrics, at 34.23 and 64.92. Such output-based methods prompt LLMs to output judgments directly, and exhibit more balanced score distributions that resemble human score patterns. Finally, we provide...

Related papers

• AIME: AI System Optimization via Multiple LLM Evaluators [79.03422337674664]
  AIME is an evaluation protocol that utilizes multiple LLMs that each independently generate an evaluation on separate criteria and then combine them via concatenation. We show AIME outperforming baseline methods in code generation tasks, with up to $62%$ higher error detection rate and up to $16%$ higher success rate than a single LLM evaluation protocol on LeetCodeHard and HumanEval datasets.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-10-04T04:03:24Z)
• DnA-Eval: Enhancing Large Language Model Evaluation through Decomposition and Aggregation [75.81096662788254]
  Large Language Models (LLMs) are scalable and economical evaluators. The question of how reliable these evaluators are has emerged as a crucial research question. We propose Decompose and Aggregate, which breaks down the evaluation process into different stages based on pedagogical practices.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-05-24T08:12:30Z)
• RepEval: Effective Text Evaluation with LLM Representation [55.26340302485898]
  RepEval is a metric that leverages the projection of Large Language Models (LLMs) representations for evaluation. Our work underscores the richness of information regarding text quality embedded within LLM representations, offering insights for the development of new metrics.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-04-30T13:50:55Z)
• Who Validates the Validators? Aligning LLM-Assisted Evaluation of LLM Outputs with Human Preferences [11.23629471911503]
  EvalGen provides automated assistance to users in generating evaluation criteria and implementing assertions. A qualitative study finds overall support for EvalGen but underscores the subjectivity and iterative process of alignment. We identify a phenomenon we dub emphcriteria drift: users need criteria to grade outputs, but grading outputs helps users define criteria.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-04-18T15:45:27Z)
• PiCO: Peer Review in LLMs based on the Consistency Optimization [19.130941716491716]
  We use peer-review mechanisms to measure large language models (LLMs) automatically. We formalize it as a constrained optimization problem, intending to maximize the consistency of each LLM's capabilities and scores. We propose three metrics called PEN, CIN, and LIS to evaluate the gap in aligning human rankings.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-02-02T18:49:26Z)
• PRE: A Peer Review Based Large Language Model Evaluator [14.585292530642603]
  Existing paradigms rely on either human annotators or model-based evaluators to evaluate the performance of LLMs. We propose a novel framework that can automatically evaluate LLMs through a peer-review process.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2024-01-28T12:33:14Z)
• Evaluating Large Language Models at Evaluating Instruction Following [54.49567482594617]
  We introduce a challenging meta-evaluation benchmark, LLMBar, designed to test the ability of an LLM evaluator in discerning instruction-following outputs. We discover that different evaluators exhibit distinct performance on LLMBar and even the highest-scoring ones have substantial room for improvement.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-10-11T16:38:11Z)
• Large Language Models are Not Yet Human-Level Evaluators for Abstractive Summarization [66.08074487429477]
  We investigate the stability and reliability of large language models (LLMs) as automatic evaluators for abstractive summarization. We find that while ChatGPT and GPT-4 outperform the commonly used automatic metrics, they are not ready as human replacements.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-05-22T14:58:13Z)
• Can Large Language Models Be an Alternative to Human Evaluations? [80.81532239566992]
  Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance on unseen tasks when only the task instructions are provided. We show that the result of LLM evaluation is consistent with the results obtained by expert human evaluation.
  arXiv  Detail & Related papers  (2023-05-03T07:28:50Z)

This list is automatically generated from the titles and abstracts of the papers in this site.

This site does not guarantee the quality of this site (including all information) and is not responsible for any consequences.