Judging the Judges: A Systematic Evaluation of Bias Mitigation Strategies in LLM-as-a-Judge Pipelines

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2604.23178v1
• Date: Sat, 25 Apr 2026 07:18:30 GMT
• Title: Judging the Judges: A Systematic Evaluation of Bias Mitigation Strategies in LLM-as-a-Judge Pipelines
• Abstract summary: We compare nine debiasing strategies across five judge models from four provider families.<n>Style bias is the dominant bias (0.76-0.92 across all models), far exceeding position bias (= 0.04)<n>The combined budget strategy significantly improves Claude Sonnet 4 by +11.2 pp (p 0.0001), with directionally positive trends for other models.
• Score: 0.0
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: LLM-as-a-Judge has become the dominant paradigm for evaluating language model outputs, yet LLM judges exhibit systematic biases that compromise evaluation reliability. We present a comprehensive empirical study comparing nine debiasing strategies across five judge models from four provider families (Google, Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta), three benchmarks (MT-Bench n=400, LLMBar n=200, custom n=225), and four bias types. Our key findings: (1) Style bias is the dominant bias (0.76-0.92 across all models), far exceeding position bias (<= 0.04), yet has received minimal research attention. (2) All models show a conciseness preference on expansion pairs, but truncation controls confirm they correctly distinguish quality from length (0.92-1.00 accuracy), suggesting quality-sensitive evaluation rather than a simple length bias. (3) Debiasing is beneficial but model-dependent: the combined budget strategy significantly improves Claude Sonnet 4 by +11.2 pp (p < 0.0001), with directionally positive trends for other models. Only 2 of 20 non-baseline configurations show decreased agreement. We release our evaluation framework, controlled dataset, and all experimental artifacts at https://github.com/sksoumik/llm-as-judge.

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