# Knockout LLM Assessment: Using Large Language Models for Evaluations through Iterative Pairwise Comparisons

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03785 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03785/

## Key facts

- Cited by 2 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 6 of its 11 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Jun 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Can Large Language Models Be an Alternative to Human Evaluations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01937/) (2023)
- [Is ChatGPT a Good NLG Evaluator? A Preliminary Study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04048/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are Effective Text Rankers with Pairwise Ranking Prompting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.17563/) (2023)
- [To Ship or Not to Ship: An Extensive Evaluation of Automatic Metrics for Machine Translation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.10821/) (2021)
- [SciEx: Benchmarking Large Language Models on Scientific Exams with Human Expert Grading and Automatic Grading](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10421/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 2 of 2)

- [ABCD: All Biases Come Disguised](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.17445/) (2026)
- [Synthetic Eggs in Many Baskets: The Impact of Synthetic Data Diversity on LLM Fine-Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.01490/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown to be effective evaluators across various domains such as machine translations or the scientific domain. Current LLM-as-a-Judge approaches rely mostly on individual assessments or a single round of pairwise assessments, preventing the judge LLM from developing a global ranking perspective. To address this, we present Knockout Assessment, an LLM-asa Judge method using a knockout tournament system with iterative pairwise comparisons. Experiments across three LLMs on two datasets show that knockout assessment improves scoring accuracy, increasing Pearson correlation with expert evaluations by 0.07 on average for university-level exam scoring and machine translation evaluations, aligning LLM assessments more closely with human scoring.