Concept · 49 episode(s)

LLM-as-Judge

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Definition

LLM-as-judge uses one language model to score another’s outputs, replacing slow and expensive human evaluation for many tasks. It’s indispensable at scale and has well-known biases: judges tend to prefer longer answers, their own family of models, and reasoning that looks confident.

Episodes covering this

  1. 207
    An AI Graded Its Own Math Test 94 Percent — It Actually Scored 20
    More Convincing, Not More Correct: Self-Play Reward Hacking of Reference-Free LLM Judges
    · ·12 min·Jul 08, 2026
  2. 205
    The Same AI, Two Labels: How the Pitch Beat the Product in 162 Sessions
    Rating the Pitch, Not the Product: User Evaluations of LLMs Reflect Expectations More Than Performance
    · ·13 min·Jul 07, 2026
  3. 202
    How Do You Know an AI Agent Actually Refused? Check the World, Not the Words
    Safety Testing LLM Agents at Scale: From Risk Discovery to Evidence-Grounded Verification
    Feng, Lin, Wen et al. · AntGroup / Hunan Institute of Advanced Technology·18 min·Jul 06, 2026
  4. 201
    One in Four NeurIPS Papers Cites a Reference That Doesn't Exist
    Phantom References: Hallucinated Citations That Survive Peer Review at Top-Tier Conferences
    Russinovich, Kumar, Salem · Microsoft·19 min·Jul 06, 2026
  5. 197
    Twin Problems Suggest AI Reasoning Gains Are Mostly Better Fact Recall
    IsoSci: A Benchmark of Isomorphic Cross-Domain Science Problems for Evaluating Reasoning versus Knowledge Retrieval in LLMs
    Abdaljalil, Serpedin, Kurban · Texas A&M University·17 min·Jul 03, 2026
  6. 196
    AI Agents Reached Opposite Conclusions From the Same Data — and Passed Review
    The Agentic Garden of Forking Paths
    Miao, Pritchard, Zou · Stanford University·18 min·Jul 03, 2026
  7. 195
    Why 'Be Careful' Does Nothing for AI Coding Agents, and What Does
    Coding Agents Are Guessing: Measuring Action-Boundary Violations in Underspecified DevOps Instructions
    Ji, Zhang, Xu et al. · Hong Kong University of Science and Technology·15 min·Jul 03, 2026
  8. 192
    A 32B Open Model Matched Frontier Systems By Learning to Take Notes
    AutoMem: Automated Learning of Memory as a Cognitive Skill
    Wu, Zhu, Zhang et al. · Stanford University·22 min·Jul 02, 2026
  9. 191
    How One Researcher Beat GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 by Judging Their Answers, Not Improving Them
    Modality-Driven Search with Holistic Trace Judging for ARC-AGI-2
    Land · Independent Researcher·26 min·Jul 02, 2026
  10. 190
    The Skill Every AI Manager Is Missing: Handing Out Exactly the Right Keys
    ClawArena-Team: Benchmarking Subagent Orchestration and Dynamic Workflows in Language-Model Agents
    Xiong, Ji, Qiu et al. · UNC Chapel Hill·21 min·Jul 02, 2026
  11. 189
    Why Phone Agents Ace the Test and Crash on Your Actual Phone
    Xiaomi-GUI-0 Technical Report
    Team, Qu, Luan · Xiaomi·24 min·Jul 02, 2026
  12. 188
    A Coding Agent Found a Hole in a Peer-Reviewed STOC Proof for Five Dollars
    Beyond the Library: An Agentic Framework for Autoformalizing Research Mathematics
    Moakhar, Gholami, Springer et al. · University of Maryland·20 min·Jul 02, 2026
  13. 184
    An AI Built an Undetectable Secret Channel, And Another AI Couldn't Find It
    Tool Use Enables Undetectable Steganography in Multi-Agent LLM Systems
    Rippin, Marshall, Africa et al. · Oxford University·19 min·Jun 30, 2026
  14. 178
    How an AI Reviewer Learned to Stop Going Easy on AI Writing
    The Red Queen Gödel Machine: Co-Evolving Agents and Their Evaluators
    Iacob, Jovanović, Shen et al. · University of Cambridge·23 min·Jun 26, 2026
  15. 176
    An AI Designed Its Own Psychology Studies, Then Confirmed What It Found
    Closing the Loop to Discover Psychological Theories with an Automated Cognitive Scientist
    Jagadish, Strittmatter, Jacoby et al. · Princeton University·31 min·Jun 26, 2026
  16. 173
    The Free Step-Level Grader Hiding in Every RL Training Run
    Neglected Free Lunch from Post-training: Progress Advantage for LLM Agents
    Oh, Li, Park et al. · University of Wisconsin–Madison·22 min·Jun 25, 2026
  17. 169
    Why Better Bug Reports Can Make AI Coding Agents Worse
    SHERLOC: Structured Diagnostic Localization for Code Repair Agents
    Tamoyan, Narenthiran, Arakelyan et al. · NVIDIA / TU Darmstadt·24 min·Jun 24, 2026
  18. 167
    How Teaching an AI to Predict, Not Act, Made It a Better Actor
    Qwen-AgentWorld: Language World Models for General Agents
    Team, Zuo, Xiao et al. · ·27 min·Jun 24, 2026
  19. 155
    Why a Flawless Demo Makes a Worse Computer-Using Agent, And the Fix
    Skill-Guided Continuation Distillation for GUI Agents
    Fan, Yu, Shen et al. · StepFun·22 min·Jun 18, 2026
  20. 152
    Training a Model to Mean What It Says, And Why That Isn't the Same as Being Good
    Self-CTRL: Self-Consistency Training with Reinforcement Learning
    Pres, Ruis, Ghebreselassie et al. · MIT CSAIL·26 min·Jun 18, 2026
  21. 147
    Agents Fail at the Body, Not the Brain: A Self-Rewriting Scaffold That Lifts a 9B Model 44 Points
    HarnessX: A Composable, Adaptive, and Evolvable Agent Harness Foundry
    Chen, Lu, Zhao et al. · ·30 min·Jun 15, 2026
  22. 146
    How an Innocent README Can Freeze an AI Agent's Safety Check for an Hour
    From Shield to Target: Denial-of-Service Attacks on LLM-Based Agent Guardrails
    Zhou, Wang, Ma et al. · Hong Kong University of Science and Technology·26 min·Jun 15, 2026
  23. 133
    How MiniMax Turned a Reward-Hacking Disaster Into Olympiad Gold
    MaxProof: Scaling Mathematical Proof with Generative-Verifier RL and Population-Level Test-Time Scaling
    Chen, Zhang, Zhang et al. · MiniMax / The Chinese University of Hong Kong·34 min·Jun 12, 2026
  24. 132
    The Agent Failed — But Did the Instructions Deserve to Be Followed?
    SkillAxe: Sharpening LLM-Authored Agent Skills Through Evaluation-Guided Self-Refinement
    Gautam, Radhakrishna, Gulwani · Microsoft·30 min·Jun 11, 2026
  25. 125
    AI Coding Agents Run a Marathon, and Fewer Than One in Three Finish
    SWE-Marathon: Can Agents Autonomously Complete Ultra-Long-Horizon Software Work?
    Desai, Hu, Cabezas et al. · Abundant·27 min·Jun 09, 2026
  26. 124
    A Cheap Model With the Blueprints Beats Expensive Models Working Blind
    Hardening Agent Benchmarks with Adversarial Hacker-Fixer Loops
    Zhong, Segal, Bercovich et al. · Carnegie Mellon University·27 min·Jun 09, 2026
  27. 123
    Five Identical Worlds, One Swapped Model: What Happens When AI Agents Run for Fifteen Days
    Emergence World: A Platform for Evaluating Long-Horizon Multi-Agent Autonomy
    Akkil, Kokku, Vikram et al. · Emergence AI·30 min·Jun 09, 2026
  28. 122
    When Your Coding Agent Lies About the Fix: Verifying the Plan Before the Model Runs
    Lean4Agent: Formal Modeling and Verification for Agent Workflow and Trajectory
    Wang, Huang, Wang et al. · University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign·24 min·Jun 09, 2026
  29. 120
    How an AI Agent Rewrites Its Own Tools, Without an Answer Key
    Retrospective Harness Optimization: Improving LLM Agents via Self-Preference over Trajectory Rollouts
    Pan, Liu, Lin et al. · City University of Hong Kong·30 min·Jun 05, 2026
  30. 118
    Why the Best-Aligned AI Models Are the Easiest to Trick Into Producing Harm
    Safety Paradox: How Enhanced Safety Awareness Leaves LLMs Vulnerable to Posterior Attack
    Hoang, Le, Xu et al. · Singapore University of Technology and Design·23 min·Jun 05, 2026
  31. 111
    How a 4B Web Agent Beat Models 60x Its Size on 500 Demonstrations
    OpenWebRL: Demystifying Online Multi-turn Reinforcement Learning for Visual Web Agents
    Yang, Wu, Chen et al. · UIUC·24 min·Jun 03, 2026
  32. 104
    How Making a Research Agent Smarter Quietly Makes It Leak Your Secrets
    MosaicLeaks:Privacy Risks in Querying-in-the-Open for Deep Research Agents
    Gurung, Gella, Drouin et al. · University of Edinburgh·25 min·Jun 01, 2026
  33. 103
    AI Agents Tried to Invent a Post-Human Language, And Reinvented Cherokee
    Emergent Languages in Populations of Language Model Agents: From Token Efficiency to Oversight Evasion
    Beltoft, Brach, Torrielli et al. · University of Southern Denmark·26 min·Jun 01, 2026
  34. 102
    How to Catch an AI Attack That No Single Conversation Reveals
    Stateful Online Monitoring Catches Distributed Agent Attacks
    Brown, Bhargav, Santhanam et al. · University of Pennsylvania·24 min·Jun 01, 2026
  35. 089
    When AI-Written Papers Read Well But the Evidence Underneath Is Broken
    ScientistOne: Towards Human-Level Autonomous Research via Chain-of-Evidence
    Meng, Mishra, Chen et al. · Google Cloud AI Research·32 min·May 27, 2026
  36. 087
    When No Agent Reads the Whole Document: A Universal Cliff in Multi-Agent Review
    A Universal Cliff and a Design Fingerprint: Cross-Section Defect Detection Under LLM Orchestration
    Fukui · Research Institute of Criminal Psychiatry·26 min·May 27, 2026
  37. 082
    Training a Deep Research Agent on 8,000 Synthetic Tasks: The Rubric Tree Trick
    QUEST: Training Frontier Deep Research Agents with Fully Synthetic Tasks
    Xie, Lin, Wang et al. · The Ohio State University·31 min·May 26, 2026
  38. 079
    An Old Idea From Cognitive Psychology Reshapes How We Reward Reasoning Models
    Metacognition as Reward: Reinforcing LLM Reasoning via Knowledge and Regulation Signals
    Chen, Xu, Zhao et al. · Tongji University / Shanghai AI Laboratory / Nanyang Technological University·29 min·May 25, 2026
  39. 062
    Treating Hallucinations as Exploits: A Gate-Based Architecture for Agent Safety
    Hallucination as Exploit: Evidence-Carrying Multimodal Agents
    Zhang, Zheng, Yang · Shenzhen University·24 min·May 20, 2026
  40. 059
    Firefly's Inversion: Building Verified Tool-Call Training Data by Working Backward
    Firefly: Illuminating Large-Scale Verified Tool-Call Data Generation from Real APIs
    Lu, Wang, Lu et al. · Northeastern University·22 min·May 20, 2026
  41. 058
    Why Upgrading Your AI Auditor to a Smarter Model Can Make Your System Less Safe
    The Capability Paradox: How Smarter Auditors Make Multi-Agent Systems Less Secure
    Liu, Holz, Ye et al. · University of Chinese Academy of Sciences·32 min·May 19, 2026
  42. 057
    How Uber Caught 206 Leaked Credentials With an LLM-Powered Security Stack
    ADR: An Agentic Detection System for Enterprise Agentic AI Security
    Li, Hu, Xu et al. · Uber Technologies·28 min·May 19, 2026
  43. 055
    Why LLM Judges Flip Their Verdicts When You Change the Question Format
    Judge Circuits
    Feldhus, Baeumel, Golimblevskaia et al. · Technische Universität Berlin / BIFOLD·26 min·May 19, 2026
  44. 045
    When a Frontier Model Talks Its Own Twin Into Climate Denial
    LLM-Based Persuasion Enables Guardrail Override in Frontier LLMs
    Nogueira, Almeida, Bonás et al. · Maritaca AI·31 min·May 15, 2026
  45. 031
    When Your AI Assistant Won't Let Go of Old Facts About You
    STALE: Can LLM Agents Know When Their Memories Are No Longer Valid?
    Chao, Bai, Sheng et al. · Wuhan University·24 min·May 09, 2026
  46. 028
    Teaching a Model to Hire Copies of Itself: Recursive Agent Optimization
    Recursive Agent Optimization
    Gandhi, Chakraborty, Wang et al. · Carnegie Mellon University·23 min·May 08, 2026
  47. 020
    The Compliance Gap: Why AI Says Yes and Does No
    The Compliance Gap: Why AI Systems Promise to Follow Process Instructions but Don't
    Shin · Polymath Minds AI Lab·28 min·May 06, 2026
  48. 019
    When the Best Reward Model Trains the Worst Policy: Inside EvoLM
    EvoLM: Self-Evolving Language Models through Co-Evolved Discriminative Rubrics
    Li, Xin, Xiao et al. · University of Washington·26 min·May 06, 2026
  49. 003
    How to Pick the Best of Sixteen Coding Agent Rollouts
    Scaling Test-Time Compute for Agentic Coding
    Kim, Yang, Niu et al. · Meta Superintelligence Labs / University of Washington·17 min·May 01, 2026

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