Cecilia Bolaños

Šimon Sedláček, Sara Barahona, Bolaji Yusuf et al.

Evaluating open-ended responses from large audio language models (LALMs) is challenging because human annotators often genuinely disagree on answer correctness due to multiple valid interpretations, partial correctness, and subjective judgment. Traditional metrics reporting only mean scores fail to capture this uncertainty. We present ORCA (Open-ended Response Correctness Assessment), a framework that models the variability in human judgments using Beta distributions to predict both expected correctness and uncertainty. Our three-stage annotation framework combines human judgment with structured feedback and iterative refinement to simultaneously curate training data and improve benchmark quality. We collected 11,721 annotations across 3,580 question-answer pairs from 15 LALMs on two audio QA benchmarks, achieving inter-annotator agreement of 0.82 (Krippendorff's alpha). ORCA achieves 0.91 Spearman correlation with mean human judgments, matching or outperforming LLM-judge baselines while providing uncertainty estimates and requiring significantly less compute. We release our models, code, and curated dataset.

Juan Wisznia, Cecilia Bolaños, Juan Tollo et al.

We introduce a novel framework for analyzing sorting algorithms in pairwise ranking prompting (PRP), re-centering the cost model around LLM inferences rather than traditional pairwise comparisons. While classical metrics based on comparison counts have traditionally been used to gauge efficiency, our analysis reveals that expensive LLM inferences overturn these predictions; accordingly, our framework encourages strategies such as batching and caching to mitigate inference costs. We show that algorithms optimal in the classical setting can lose efficiency when LLM inferences dominate the cost under certain optimizations.