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arXiv · 2609.37577

Pair Difficulty Matters: Rethinking Pairwise LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation and Consistency

Bruno Brocai·Maria Becker
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Abstract

Large Language Model judges are widely used to rank texts and text-generating systems through pairwise comparison, and their reliability is typically assessed via three proxies: position bias, transitivity, and pairwise agreement (self- or human-labeled). Because these proxies drive judge selection and benchmarking, a substantial literature reporting that judges perform poorly on them risks steering practitioners away from otherwise capable evaluators. We argue this assessment is misleading. Under the Bradley--Terry geometry underlying pairwise aggregation, each proxy is dominated by close-rank-gap pairs, where inconsistency is information-theoretically expected and individual verdicts contribute little to the aggregate ranking; far-gap pairs carry the ranking signal but barely move the proxies. We formalize this argument and validate it in a controlled simulation and on two human-rated corpora: the proxies correlate only weakly with ranking accuracy against gold, and their predictive component concentrates in the far-gap regime. Judges should therefore be assessed on rank-gap-conditional metrics, ideally against human rankings. Code at https://github.com/brunobrocai/PairDifficulty.

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Bruno Brocai, Maria Becker. 2026-09-29. Pair Difficulty Matters: Rethinking Pairwise LLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation and Consistency. https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.37577

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