Zhumin Chu

Zhumin Chu, Qingyao Ai, Yiteng Tu et al.

The impressive performance of large language models (LLMs) has attracted considerable attention from the academic and industrial communities. Besides how to construct and train LLMs, how to effectively evaluate and compare the capacity of LLMs has also been well recognized as an important yet difficult problem. Existing paradigms rely on either human annotators or model-based evaluators to evaluate the performance of LLMs on different tasks. However, these paradigms often suffer from high cost, low generalizability, and inherited biases in practice, which make them incapable of supporting the sustainable development of LLMs in long term. In order to address these issues, inspired by the peer review systems widely used in academic publication process, we propose a novel framework that can automatically evaluate LLMs through a peer-review process. Specifically, for the evaluation of a specific task, we first construct a small qualification exam to select "reviewers" from a couple of powerful LLMs. Then, to actually evaluate the "submissions" written by different candidate LLMs, i.e., the evaluatees, we use the reviewer LLMs to rate or compare the submissions. The final ranking of evaluatee LLMs is generated based on the results provided by all reviewers. We conducted extensive experiments on text summarization tasks with eleven LLMs including GPT-4. The results demonstrate the existence of biasness when evaluating using a single LLM. Also, our PRE model outperforms all the baselines, illustrating the effectiveness of the peer review mechanism.

Junjie Chen, Weihang Su, Zhumin Chu et al.

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) has highlighted the need for efficient and reliable methods to evaluate their performance. Traditional evaluation methods often face challenges like high costs, limited task formats, dependence on human references, and systematic biases. To address these limitations, we propose Auto-PRE, an automatic LLM evaluation framework inspired by the peer review process. Unlike previous approaches that rely on human annotations, Auto-PRE automatically selects evaluator LLMs based on three core traits: consistency, pertinence, and self-confidence, which correspond to the instruction, content, and response stages, respectively, and collectively cover the entire evaluation process. Experiments on three representative tasks, including summarization, non-factoid QA, and dialogue generation, demonstrate that Auto-PRE achieves state-of-the-art performance while significantly reducing evaluation costs. Furthermore, the structured and scalable design of our automatic qualification exam framework provides valuable insights into automating the evaluation of LLMs-as-judges, paving the way for more advanced LLM-based evaluation frameworks.