@inproceedings{jwa-etal-2026-becoming,
    title = "Becoming Experienced Judges: Selective Test-Time Learning for Evaluators",
    author = "Jwa, Seungyeon  and
      Ahn, Daechul  and
      Kim, Reokyoung  and
      Kang, Dongyeop  and
      Choi, Jonghyun",
    editor = "Demberg, Vera  and
      Inui, Kentaro  and
      Marquez, Llu{\'i}s",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 19th Conference of the {E}uropean Chapter of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)",
    month = mar,
    year = "2026",
    address = "Rabat, Morocco",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.eacl-short.50/",
    pages = "697--721",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-381-4",
    abstract = "Automatic evaluation with large language models, commonly known as LLM-as-a-judge, is now standard across reasoning and alignment tasks. Despite evaluating many samples in deployment, these evaluators typically (i) treat each case independently, missing the opportunity to accumulate and reuse evaluation insights across cases, and (ii) rely on a single fixed prompt for all cases, neglecting the need for sample-specific evaluation criteria. We introduce **Learning While Evaluating** (LWE), a framework that allows evaluators to improve *sequentially* at inference time without requiring additional training or external signals. LWE maintains an evolving *meta-prompt* that (i) stores evaluation insights derived from self-generated feedback during sequential testing, and (ii) allows evaluators to leverage these insights to generate sample-specific evaluation instructions for accurate and consistent judgments. Furthermore, we propose ***Selective* LWE**, which updates the meta-prompt only on self-inconsistent cases, focusing computation where it matters most. This selective approach retains the benefits of sequential learning while being far more cost-effective. Across two pairwise comparison benchmarks, *Selective* LWE outperforms strong baselines, empirically demonstrating that evaluators can improve during sequential testing with a simple selective update{---}learning most from the cases they struggle with."
}