AGORA: Reliability-Aware Aggregation of LLM Judges via Item-Response Theory

Abstract

LLM-as-a-judge is a common substitute for costly human evaluation, and aggregating several judges is the standard remedy for any single judge's bias. Judge pools mix judges of very different reliability, while the human-labeled sets that validate them hold a few hundred items or fewer. In this regime the per-item mean weights weak judges as heavily as strong ones, and confusion-table models such as Dawid-Skene must estimate a per-judge error table from too few items. We propose AGORA (Aggregation Of Reliability-weighted Assessments), an item-response-theory aggregator that places every item on one latent quality scale and describes each judge by a sensitivity parameter and ordered rating thresholds, so judge reliability is learned from all items jointly and without human labels. Across three benchmarks, AGORA matches or exceeds Dawid-Skene on large evaluation sets, and its advantage widens as the set shrinks toward a few hundred items. It remains accurate as pools grow more uneven, a label-free dispersion statistic indicates in advance when trust weighting helps, and its learned trust weights track per-judge human validity.