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arXiv · 2607.28641

The Formalism Trap: Are LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluators Blinded by Consensus Mimicry under Social Load?

Dahlia Shehata·Ming Li
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Abstract

We introduce the \textit{Agentic Formalism Trap} and the Evaluative Dissonance Index ($D_E$), quantifying how LLM-as-a-Judge systems conflate structural proceduralism with semantic truth under adversarial load. Analyzing 22,500 trajectories across 3 domains (GAIA, SWE-bench, Multi-Challenge), we extract a semantic taxonomy of hallucination maneuvers, validated via deterministic lexical grounding ($p < 10^{-120}$). A logistic meta-evaluator isolates the exact syntactic triggers of this evaluator capture (ROC-AUC 0.8779), while a zero-shot Leave-One-Domain-Out transfer proves the vulnerability is universally domain-agnostic (mean ROC-AUC 0.7482). Architectural profiling reveals that distinct simulated swarm topologies induce mathematically disparate semantic blind spots, proving that unanchored closed-loop evaluation is unstable, systemically divergent and necessitates architecture-specific vigilance filters.

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Dahlia Shehata, Ming Li. 2026-05-20. The Formalism Trap: Are LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluators Blinded by Consensus Mimicry under Social Load?. https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.28641

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