flakyjudge 0.1.0

How stable are natural-language unit tests for LLM evals? An empirical robustness study and mitigation library.

flakyjudge

How stable are natural-language unit tests for LLM evals?

Teams increasingly evaluate LLM outputs with natural-language unit tests — discrete assertions like "Does the response cite the refund window?" scored by a judge model (LMUnit, TICK, checklist evals). This project measures the reliability of that paradigm: if you reword the assertion without changing its meaning, does the verdict change?

📄 Tech report: report/report.md — methods, all results, practical guidance, limitations.

Experimental design frozen in PREREGISTRATION.md. Five judges across three families: gpt-4o, gpt-4o-mini, claude-sonnet-4-6, claude-haiku-4-5, llama-3.1-8b. ~24,000 scored triples, $19 total spend.

Findings

• Rewording a unit test flips its pass/fail verdict on 14–25% of items (sonnet 25%, gpt-4o & haiku 20.5%, mini 14.1%) — 5–20× each judge's identical-input resampling noise floor (0.8–4%).

• Criterion wording acts as a hidden decision threshold: flips concentrate ~3–7× on items whose scores sit near the pass/fail cut (29–40%) vs clear verdicts (5–13%).

  

• "Stability" without validity is insensitivity — the controls catch it: llama-8b looks most stable under paraphrase (5% flips) but barely reacts to deliberately meaning-changed criteria either (1–3% vs Claude's 47–54%) — it isn't robust, it isn't reading the criterion. Every real judge shifts 3–4× more on controls than on true paraphrases.

  

• The classic verbosity bias disappears under criterion-anchored judging, in every family: content-matched 1.8× padding produces no significant positive drift for any judge; gpt-4o rewards concision (+0.23, p=0.03) and Claude trends mildly negative. The length halo documented for holistic/pairwise judging does not survive decomposition.

• The logprob-weighted scoring trick is a small-model story: it buys +0.01–0.02 Spearman for GPT-4o-class judges (CIs cross zero) but +0.23 for llama-8b (CI [+0.17, +0.29]) — rescuing it from ρ≈0.13 to ρ≈0.43. Expectation-scoring is what makes small judges usable.

• Validity and stability don't come together: claude-sonnet is the most human-aligned judge (ρ=0.69 vs the 0.56 human-agreement ceiling) AND the most paraphrase-flippy (25%) — and the least format-compliant (~10% of calls ignore the bare-digit instruction; OpenAI judges: 0%).

• Rubrics make judges harsher, not more valid: appending the FLASK rubric+reference shifts scores −0.25 to −0.29 with ~no correlation gain.

What this is

An empirical robustness study across 5 judge models in 3 families (GPT-4o, GPT-4o-mini, Claude Sonnet 4.6, Claude Haiku 4.5, Llama-3.1-8B) on FLASK and BiGGen-Bench items, plus a small library implementing the measurement tools and mitigations:

• E1 — judge-human correlation anchor; logprob-weighted vs. direct scoring
• E2 — identical-input noise floor (resampling + field-order stability)
• E3 — headline: paraphrase sensitivity of the unit-test criterion itself
• E4 — verbosity bias under criterion-anchored judging

Related work measures judge robustness at the response level (Judge Reliability Harness) and template level; this study targets the criterion level — the load-bearing assumption of the unit-test paradigm (LMUnit).

Use the mitigation: pip install flakyjudge

Our headline finding is that single-shot verdicts silently depend on how you worded the assertion. ensemble_score() makes that visible: it scores your criterion plus n auto-generated meaning-preserving rewordings and reports the spread.

from flakyjudge import ensemble_score

r = ensemble_score(
    query="What is your refund policy?",
    response="You can return items within 30 days for a full refund.",
    unit_test="Does the response state the refund time window?",
    judge="gpt-4o-mini",        # or gpt-4o / claude-sonnet / claude-haiku,
    n_paraphrases=4,            #    or any flakyjudge.JudgeSpec
)
r.score    # 5.00 (mean across wordings; logprob-weighted where available)
r.stable   # True -> no wording flips the verdict
r.margin   # 2.50 (distance from threshold; <1 means borderline: distrust it)

Use it for gating/CI evals where a silent wording flip matters; responses are cached in ~/.flakyjudge/ so repeat runs are free.

Reproducibility

Every raw API response (including logprobs) is committed in a content-addressed cache, so all results and figures regenerate with zero API keys and zero dollars:

git clone https://github.com/ShivaSankeerth/flakyjudge && cd flakyjudge
uv sync
make cache-unpack   # inflate the committed API-response cache (19MB gz)
make figures

Development

uv sync --extra dev
make test    # pytest: metrics vs published worked examples, cache, providers
make lint    # ruff

License

MIT