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Assessing Judging Bias in Large Reasoning Models: An Empirical Study

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arxiv 2504.09946 v2 pith:AOYKVHR7 submitted 2025-04-14 cs.CY cs.CL

Assessing Judging Bias in Large Reasoning Models: An Empirical Study

classification cs.CY cs.CL
keywords biasesdatasetslrmsreasoningbiasfact-relatedjudgingpreference
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Large Reasoning Models (LRMs) like DeepSeek-R1 and OpenAI-o1 have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities, raising important questions about their biases in LLM-as-a-judge settings. We present a comprehensive benchmark comparing judging biases between LLMs and LRMs across both subjective preference-alignment datasets and objective fact-based datasets. Through investigation of bandwagon, authority, position, and distraction biases, we uncover four key findings: (1) despite their advanced reasoning capabilities, LRMs remain susceptible to the above biases; (2) LRMs demonstrate better robustness than LLMs specifically on fact-related datasets; (3) LRMs exhibit notable position bias, preferring options in later positions; and (4) we identify a novel "superficial reflection bias" where phrases mimicking reasoning (e.g., "wait, let me think...") significantly influence model judgments. To address these biases, we design and evaluate three mitigation strategies: specialized system prompts that reduce judging biases by up to 19\% in preference alignment datasets and 14\% in fact-related datasets, in-context learning that provides up to 27\% improvement on preference tasks but shows inconsistent results on factual tasks, and a self-reflection mechanism that reduces biases by up to 10\% in preference datasets and 16\% in fact-related datasets, with self-reflection proving particularly effective for LRMs. Our work provides crucial insights for developing more reliable LLM-as-a-Judge frameworks, especially as LRMs become increasingly deployed as automated judges.

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Cited by 9 Pith papers

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