@inproceedings{xu-etal-2025-context,
    title = "Does Context Matter? {C}ontextual{J}udge{B}ench for Evaluating {LLM}-based Judges in Contextual Settings",
    author = "Xu, Austin  and
      Bansal, Srijan  and
      Ming, Yifei  and
      Yavuz, Semih  and
      Joty, Shafiq",
    editor = "Che, Wanxiang  and
      Nabende, Joyce  and
      Shutova, Ekaterina  and
      Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Vienna, Austria",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.470/",
    pages = "9541--9564",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0",
    abstract = "The large language model (LLM)-as-judge paradigm has been used to meet the demand for a cheap, reliable, and fast evaluation of model outputs during AI system development and post-deployment monitoring. While judge models{---}LLMs finetuned to specialize in assessing and critiquing model outputs{---}have been touted as general purpose evaluators, they are typically evaluated only on non-contextual scenarios, such as instruction following. The omission of contextual settings{---}those where external information is used as context to generate an output{---}is surprising given the increasing prevalence of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and summarization use cases. Contextual assessment is uniquely challenging, as evaluation often depends on practitioner priorities, leading to conditional evaluation criteria (e.g., comparing responses based on factuality and then considering completeness if they are equally factual). To address the gap, we propose ContextualJudgeBench, a judge benchmark with 2,000 challenging response pairs across eight splits inspired by real-world contextual evaluation scenarios. We build our benchmark with a multi-pronged data construction pipeline that leverages both existing human annotations and model-based perturbations. Our comprehensive study across 11 judge models and 7 general purpose models, reveals that the contextual information and assessment criteria present a significant challenge to even state-of-the-art models. For example, o1, the best-performing model, barely reaches 55{\%} consistent accuracy."
}