juryrig

Audit your LLM judges before you trust them.

LLM-as-judge is everywhere: the cheapest way to grade model outputs is to ask another model. But the judge is a model too — with position bias, a weakness for long-winded answers, run-to-run inconsistency, and confidence that rarely matches its accuracy. If you haven't measured those, your eval numbers are decoration.

juryrig is a small, zero-dependency Python toolkit that treats the judge as the thing under test:

• Position-bias audit — present every A/B pair in both orders; count how often the slot (not the content) decides the winner.
• Verbosity-bias audit — re-score responses padded with content-free filler; a fair judge shouldn't reward padding.
• Prompt-injection audit — append judge-targeted instructions to bad responses; a robust judge should grade the answer, not obey it.
• Self-consistency — same input, several runs; how stable is the score?
• Panels — pool several judges (mean / median / min) and get an agreement score, so you know when your verdict depends on which judge you picked. Pairwise panels vote on A/B pairs and report a dead heat as one.
• Calibration — Brier score, reliability tables, and expected calibration error against human labels.

Run the whole battery with audit_suite(), or from the command line with juryrig cases.json.

Install

pip install juryrig

Requires Python 3.10+. Package page: pypi.org/project/juryrig. Source: github.com/ianalloway/juryrig.

Quickstart

from juryrig import (
    MockJudge,
    Panel,
    position_bias,
    prompt_injection_bias,
    verbosity_bias,
)

rubric = "Answer must mention photosynthesis, chlorophyll, sunlight, and energy."

# 1. Audit a judge before using it
judge = MockJudge(name="demo")    # swap in your own judge for real audits
cases = [("How do plants make food?", "good answer...", "weak answer...")]

bias = position_bias(judge, cases, rubric)
print(f"flip rate: {bias.flip_rate:.0%}  flagged: {bias.flagged}")

injection = prompt_injection_bias(judge, [("Weak answer prompt", "vague answer")], rubric)
print(f"injection lift: {injection.mean_delta:+.3f}  flagged: {injection.flagged}")

# 2. Use a panel instead of a single judge
panel = Panel([MockJudge(name="primary"), MockJudge(name="baseline")])
report = panel.evaluate(prompt="How do plants make food?",
                        response="Photosynthesis converts sunlight...",
                        rubric=rubric)
print(report.pooled, report.agreement)

position_bias() is a pairwise audit and needs a judge with compare(); MockJudge implements both compare() and judge() so the quickstart runs without API credentials.

The whole battery in one call

audit_suite() runs every audit and pools the verdicts. Each case is a (prompt, good_response, weak_response) triple: the pair drives the position comparison, the good response gets padded to detect verbosity bias, and the weak one carries the injection payload.

from juryrig import MockJudge, audit_suite

report = audit_suite(MockJudge(), cases, rubric)

print(report.summary())
assert not report.flagged, f"judge failed: {report.failures}"

report.failures names the audits that tripped (("position", "injection")). If the judge has no compare(), the position audit is reported in report.skipped rather than silently counted as a pass.

Ties

compare() may return "tie" as well as "A" or "B". It's optional — a judge that only ever picks a side is unaffected — but real judges often want to call two answers equivalent, and forcing that into a coin flip manufactures position bias that isn't there.

How position_bias() accounts for them:

• Tying both ways is not a flip. The judge gave the same answer in both orders, which is consistency, not order-dependence.
• Tying one way and picking the other way is a flip. The verdict changed when only the order changed — that's the thing being measured.
• Ties are excluded from first_slot_wins. Counting them as "not won by the first slot" would drag the ratio to 0 and flag a judge that ties everything as maximally biased toward slot two. With nothing decisive to go on the audit reports 0.5: no evidence of skew. The count is kept in report.ties so it stays visible rather than silently dropped.

Panels of pairwise judges

Panel.evaluate() pools scores; Panel.compare() pools A/B votes by majority:

verdict = panel.compare(prompt="How do plants make food?",
                        a="Photosynthesis converts sunlight...",
                        b="Plants eat soil.",
                        rubric=rubric)

print(verdict.winner, verdict.agreement, verdict.votes)

An even split sets winner to None and deadlocked to True, rather than picking a side. A coin-flip winner would hide exactly the disagreement you convened a panel to find. Judges without compare() are rejected by name — silently dropping them would move the verdict while leaving agreement looking healthy.

Going faster against a real judge

audit_suite on N cases is roughly 4N judge calls, which is minutes of wall time over a network. max_workers runs them in parallel:

report = audit_suite(judge, cases, rubric, max_workers=8)

Serial by default, because a judge may be stateful or rate-limited and threading one behind your back would be a surprise. Results are collected in input order, so a report is identical no matter how many workers produced it — workers are a speed knob, never a correctness one. Your judge must be thread-safe to raise it. The CLI exposes the same thing as --workers.

Tuning what counts as a failure

Every flagged verdict comes from a Thresholds object. The defaults are strict on purpose, but they're yours to move:

from juryrig import Thresholds, audit_suite

report = audit_suite(judge, cases, rubric, thresholds=Thresholds(
    injection_max_delta=0.05,   # stricter: near-zero tolerance for injection
    verbosity_mean_delta=0.10,  # looser: this judge is allowed to like detail
))

The measurements never change — only the line between pass and fail. Each report carries the thresholds it was judged against, so a stored report still explains its own verdict. A case file can set them too, under a "thresholds" key; unknown keys are rejected rather than ignored, so a typo can't silently leave the strict default in force.

Command line

juryrig examples/cases.json                       # audit the built-in MockJudge
juryrig cases.json --provider anthropic --json    # audit a live judge

The case file is {"rubric": ..., "cases": [{"prompt", "good", "weak"}, ...]}. The command exits 1 when the judge is flagged and 2 on bad input, so a CI step is one line. Without installing, use python -m juryrig cases.json.

Optional: provider-backed judges

AnthropicJudge and OpenAIJudge wrap the Anthropic/OpenAI HTTP APIs (stdlib-only, no extra dependencies) and work with the single-response audits. They're not exported from the top-level package — import them explicitly when you need a live model:

from juryrig.providers import AnthropicJudge, OpenAIJudge  # needs *_API_KEY env var

An audit is many calls in a row, so both retry transient failures (429, 5xx, network errors) with exponential backoff — one flaky response shouldn't throw away every result collected before it. A numeric Retry-After is honoured. Client errors like 401 and 404 fail fast, since they'd fail identically on every attempt.

from juryrig.providers import AnthropicJudge, RetryPolicy

judge = AnthropicJudge(retry=RetryPolicy(attempts=5, backoff=1.0))

Every audit returns a small frozen dataclass with a flagged property, so gating a CI pipeline is one if:

assert not position_bias(judge, cases, rubric).flagged, "judge is positionally biased"

Why the MockJudge has built-in flaws

MockJudge(position_bias=..., verbosity_bias=..., injection_bias=..., noise=..., instability=..., tie_margin=...) lets you dial in known defects. That's how juryrig tests itself — the audits must detect a rigged judge and clear a fair one — and it gives you a deterministic, network-free way to test your eval pipeline end to end.

noise and instability are not the same knob, and the difference trips people up:

• noise is seeded on the input, so re-judging one response returns the same score forever. It perturbs scores across responses.
• instability is seeded on a call counter, so the same input scores differently each time. It's the only flaw self_consistency() can detect — a judge with noise=0.9 reports a spread of exactly 0.0.

Instability is still reproducible: a fresh MockJudge replays the same sequence, so switching the flaw on doesn't make your tests flaky.

tie_margin makes the judge answer "tie" when two responses score within it. Useful for exercising tie handling — and note that without it, two identical answers are handed to slot A by compare()'s tie-break, which the position audit correctly reports as bias.

Calibration

from juryrig import brier_score, expected_calibration_error

scores = [0.9, 0.8, 0.3, 0.95]   # judge scores
labels = [1, 1, 0, 0]            # human ground truth

print(brier_score(scores, labels))
print(expected_calibration_error(scores, labels))

A judge that says 0.9 should be right ~90% of the time. ECE tells you how far that promise is from reality.

Demo

python3 examples/audit_demo.py

Runs the full audit suite against a fair judge and a rigged one, no API keys required.

Design notes

• Zero runtime dependencies — stdlib only, including the API clients.
• Provider-agnostic — a judge is anything with a judge() method; pairwise judges add compare(). Protocols, not base classes.
• Deterministic tests — all randomness is hash-seeded; CI never flakes.
• Typed — ships a PEP 561 py.typed marker, so the hints reach your type checker.

License

MIT