Sher Badshah

Sher Badshah, Hassan Sajjad

The emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) as chat assistants capable of generating human-like conversations has amplified the need for robust evaluation methods, particularly for open-ended tasks. Conventional metrics such as EM and F1, while useful, are inadequate for capturing the full semantics and contextual depth of such generative outputs. We propose a reference-guided verdict method that automates the evaluation process by leveraging multiple LLMs as judges. Through experiments on free-form question-answering tasks, we demonstrate that combining multiple models improves the reliability and accuracy of evaluations, especially in tasks where a single model may struggle. The results indicate a strong correlation with human evaluations, establishing the proposed method as a reliable alternative to traditional metrics.

Sher Badshah, Ali Emami, Hassan Sajjad

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as judges to replace costly human preference labels in pairwise evaluation. Despite their practicality, LLM judges remain prone to miscalibration and systematic biases. This paper proposes SCOPE (Selective Conformal Optimized Pairwise Evaluation), a framework for selective pairwise judging with finite-sample statistical guarantees. Under exchangeability, SCOPE calibrates an acceptance threshold such that the error rate among non-abstained judgments is at most a user-specified level $α$. To provide SCOPE with a bias-neutral uncertainty signal, we introduce Bidirectional Preference Entropy (BPE), which queries the judge under both response positions, aggregates the implied preference probabilities to enforce invariance to response order, and converts the aggregated probability into an entropy-based uncertainty score. Across MT-Bench, RewardBench, and Chatbot Arena, BPE improves uncertainty quality over standard confidence proxies, providing a stronger selection signal that enables SCOPE to consistently meet the target risk level while retaining good coverage across judge scales. In particular, at $α= 0.10$, SCOPE consistently satisfies the risk bound across all benchmarks and judge scales (empirical risk $\approx 0.097$ to $0.099$), while retaining substantial coverage, reaching $0.89$ on RewardBench with Qwen-14B and $0.98$ on RewardBench with Qwen-32B. Compared to naïve baselines, SCOPE accepts up to $2.4\times$ more judgments on MT-Bench with Qwen-7B under the same target risk constraint, demonstrating that BPE enables reliable and high-coverage LLM-based evaluation.

Sher Badshah, Hassan Sajjad

Scale is often attributed as one of the factors that cause an increase in the performance of LLMs, resulting in models with billion and trillion parameters. One of the limitations of such large models is the high computational requirements that limit their usage, deployment, and debugging in resource-constrained scenarios. Two commonly used alternatives to bypass these limitations are to use the smaller versions of LLMs (e.g. Llama 7B instead of Llama 70B) and lower the memory requirements by using quantization. While these approaches effectively address the limitation of resources, their impact on model performance needs thorough examination. In this study, we perform a comprehensive evaluation to investigate the effect of model scale and quantization on the performance. We experiment with two major families of open-source instruct models ranging from 7 billion to 70 billion parameters. Our extensive zero-shot experiments across various tasks including natural language understanding, reasoning, misinformation detection, and hallucination reveal that larger models generally outperform their smaller counterparts, suggesting that scale remains an important factor in enhancing performance. We found that larger models show exceptional resilience to precision reduction and can maintain high accuracy even at 4-bit quantization for numerous tasks and they serve as a better solution than using smaller models at high precision under similar memory requirements.

Sher Badshah, Moamen Moustafa, Hassan Sajjad

Evaluating free-form Question Answering (QA) remains a challenge due to its diverse and open-ended nature. Traditional automatic metrics fail to capture semantic equivalence or accommodate the variability of open-ended responses. Leveraging Large Language Models (LLMs) as evaluators offers a promising alternative due to their strong language understanding and instruction-following capabilities. We propose Consensus via Lightweight Efficient Voting (CLEV), which employs two primary LLMs as judges and invokes a third judge only in cases of disagreement. This approach prioritizes evaluation reliability while reducing unnecessary computational demands. Through experiments, including human evaluation, we demonstrate CLEV's ability to provide consistent, scalable, and resource-efficient assessments, establishing it as a robust framework for evaluating LLMs on free-form QA.

Arif Ali Khan, Sher Badshah, Peng Liang et al.

Ethics in AI becomes a global topic of interest for both policymakers and academic researchers. In the last few years, various research organizations, lawyers, think tankers and regulatory bodies get involved in developing AI ethics guidelines and principles. However, there is still debate about the implications of these principles. We conducted a systematic literature review (SLR) study to investigate the agreement on the significance of AI principles and identify the challenging factors that could negatively impact the adoption of AI ethics principles. The results reveal that the global convergence set consists of 22 ethical principles and 15 challenges. Transparency, privacy, accountability and fairness are identified as the most common AI ethics principles. Similarly, lack of ethical knowledge and vague principles are reported as the significant challenges for considering ethics in AI. The findings of this study are the preliminary inputs for proposing a maturity model that assess the ethical capabilities of AI systems and provide best practices for further improvements.