@article{hong-etal-2026-beyond,
    title = "Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Inversion Learning for Highly Effective {NLG} Evaluation Prompts",
    author = "Hong, Hanhua  and
      Xiao, Chenghao  and
      Wang, Yang  and
      Liu, Yiqi  and
      Rong, Wenge  and
      Lin, Chenghua",
    journal = "Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics",
    volume = "14",
    year = "2026",
    address = "Cambridge, MA",
    publisher = "MIT Press",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-latest-mitpress-cl-tacl/2026.tacl-1.31/",
    doi = "10.1162/tacl.a.617",
    pages = "689--710",
    abstract = "Evaluating natural language generation systems is challenging due to the diversity of valid outputs. While human evaluation is the gold standard, it suffers from inconsistencies, lack of standardization, and demographic biases, limiting reproducibility. LLM-based evaluators offer a scalable alternative but are highly sensitive to prompt design, where small variations can lead to significant discrepancies. In this work, we propose an inversion learning method that learns effective reverse mappings from model outputs back to their input instructions, enabling the automatic generation of highly effective, model-specific evaluation prompts. Our method requires only a single evaluation sample and eliminates the need for time-consuming manual prompt engineering, thereby improving both efficiency and robustness. Our work contributes toward a new direction for more robust and efficient LLM-based evaluation."
}