Support Evaluation for the TREC 2024 RAG Track: Comparing Human versus LLM Judges

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2504.15205v1
• Date: Mon, 21 Apr 2025 16:20:43 GMT
• Title: Support Evaluation for the TREC 2024 RAG Track: Comparing Human versus LLM Judges
• Authors: Nandan Thakur, Ronak Pradeep, Shivani Upadhyay, Daniel Campos, Nick Craswell, Jimmy Lin,
• Abstract summary: A crucial factor in RAG evaluation is "support", whether the information in the cited documents supports the answer.<n>We conducted a large-scale comparative study of 45 participant submissions on 36 topics to the TREC 2024 RAG Track.<n>Our results indicate that for 56% of the manual from-scratch assessments, human and GPT-4o predictions match perfectly.
• Score: 53.12387628636912
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/
• Abstract: Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enables large language models (LLMs) to generate answers with citations from source documents containing "ground truth", thereby reducing system hallucinations. A crucial factor in RAG evaluation is "support", whether the information in the cited documents supports the answer. To this end, we conducted a large-scale comparative study of 45 participant submissions on 36 topics to the TREC 2024 RAG Track, comparing an automatic LLM judge (GPT-4o) against human judges for support assessment. We considered two conditions: (1) fully manual assessments from scratch and (2) manual assessments with post-editing of LLM predictions. Our results indicate that for 56% of the manual from-scratch assessments, human and GPT-4o predictions match perfectly (on a three-level scale), increasing to 72% in the manual with post-editing condition. Furthermore, by carefully analyzing the disagreements in an unbiased study, we found that an independent human judge correlates better with GPT-4o than a human judge, suggesting that LLM judges can be a reliable alternative for support assessment. To conclude, we provide a qualitative analysis of human and GPT-4o errors to help guide future iterations of support assessment.

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