# Is Your Video Language Model a Reliable Judge?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05977 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05977/

## Key facts

- Cited by 14 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 28 of its 38 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 7 Mar 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 28 of 28)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Flamingo: a Visual Language Model for Few-Shot Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.14198/) (2022)
- [InstructBLIP: Towards General-purpose Vision-Language Models with Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06500/) (2023)
- [CIDEr: Consensus-based Image Description Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1411.5726/) (2014)
- [Video-LLaMA: An Instruction-tuned Audio-Visual Language Model for Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.02858/) (2023)
- [Video-LLaVA: Learning United Visual Representation by Alignment Before Projection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.10122/) (2023)
- [VideoChat: Chat-Centric Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06355/) (2023)
- [Eyes Wide Shut? Exploring the Visual Shortcomings of Multimodal LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.06209/) (2024)
- [Can Large Language Models Be an Alternative to Human Evaluations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01937/) (2023)
- [Prometheus: Inducing Fine-grained Evaluation Capability in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08491/) (2023)
- [LLaMA-VID: An Image is Worth 2 Tokens in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.17043/) (2023)
- [MovieChat: From Dense Token to Sparse Memory for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.16449/) (2023)
- [Weak-to-Strong Generalization: Eliciting Strong Capabilities With Weak Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09390/) (2023)
- [InternVideo: General Video Foundation Models via Generative and Discriminative Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.03191/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models Are State-of-the-Art Evaluators of Translation Quality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.14520/) (2023)
- [TimeChat: A Time-sensitive Multimodal Large Language Model for Long Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.02051/) (2023)
- [EVA-02: A Visual Representation for Neon Genesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.11331/) (2023)
- [JudgeLM: Fine-tuned Large Language Models are Scalable Judges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17631/) (2023)
- [T2V-CompBench: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Compositional Text-to-video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14505/) (2024)
- [Generative Judge for Evaluating Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05470/) (2023)
- [Vision language models are blind: Failing to translate detailed visual features into words](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06581/) (2024)
- [PG-Video-LLaVA: Pixel Grounding Large Video-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.13435/) (2023)
- [Improving Automatic VQA Evaluation Using Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.02567/) (2023)
- [Tuning Large Multimodal Models for Videos using Reinforcement Learning from AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03746/) (2024)
- [How Good is my Video LMM? Complex Video Reasoning and Robustness Evaluation Suite for Video-LMMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03690/) (2024)
- [Reassessing Evaluation Practices in Visual Question Answering: A Case Study on Out-of-Distribution Generalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12191/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 14 of 14)

- [VideoHallu: Evaluating and Mitigating Multi-modal Hallucinations on Synthetic Video Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01481/) (2025)
- [PPTArena: A Benchmark for PowerPoint Editing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.03042/) (2025)
- [VBVR-Pro: A Scalable and Verifiable Suite for Native Visual Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.26105/) (2026)
- [Movie Facts and Fibs (MF2): A Benchmark for Long Movie Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.06275/) (2025)
- [EgoExo-Con: Exploring View-Invariant Video Temporal Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26113/) (2025)
- [K-Sort Eval: Efficient Preference Evaluation for Visual Generation via Corrected VLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.09411/) (2026)
- [Wan-R1: Verifiable-Reinforcement Learning for Video Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.27866/) (2026)
- [Automated Model Discovery via Multi-modal & Multi-step Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.25946/) (2025)
- [GT-SVJ: Generative-Transformer-Based Self-Supervised Video Judge For Efficient Video Reward Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.05202/) (2026)
- [SLVMEval: Synthetic Meta Evaluation Benchmark for Text-to-Long Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.29186/) (2026)
- [Pruning the Paradox: How CLIP's Most Informative Heads Enhance Performance While Amplifying Bias](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11103/) (2025)
- [A Physics-Grounded Benchmark for Multi-Agent Dynamics in World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.28757/) (2026)
- [SGA: Plug&Play Geometric Verification for Educational Video Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.18116/) (2026)
- [Group-of-Latents: Perceptual Video Compression at Extreme Bitrates via Masked Latent Generative Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.19437/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

As video language models (VLMs) gain more applications in various scenarios, the need for robust and scalable evaluation of their performance becomes increasingly critical. The traditional human expert-based evaluation of VLMs has limitations in consistency and scalability, which sparked interest in automatic methods such as employing VLMs to evaluate VLMs. However, the reliability of VLMs as judges remains underexplored. Existing methods often rely on a single VLM as the evaluator. However, this approach can be unreliable or biased because such a model may lack the ability to fully understand the content and may have inherent biases, ultimately compromising evaluation reliability. A remedy is to apply the principle of collective thoughts, aggregating evaluations from multiple VLMs to enhance reliability. This study investigates the efficacy of such approaches, particularly when the pool of judges includes both reliable and unreliable models. Our findings reveal that incorporating collective judgments from such a mixed pool does not necessarily improve the accuracy of the final evaluation. The inclusion of less reliable judges can introduce noise, undermining the overall reliability of the outcomes. To explore the factors that impact evaluation reliability, we fine-tune an underperforming VLM judge, Video-LLaVA, and observe that improved understanding ability alone is insufficient to make VLM judges more reliable. These findings stress the limitations of collective thought approaches and highlight the need for more advanced methods that can account for the reliability of individual models. Our study promotes the development of more reliable evaluation methods for VLMs