# Are Checklists Really Useful for Automatic Evaluation of Generative Tasks?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.15218 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.15218/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 15 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Aug 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Training a Helpful and Harmless Assistant with Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.05862/) (2022)
- [A Survey on LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.15594/) (2024)
- [FActScore: Fine-grained Atomic Evaluation of Factual Precision in Long Form Text Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14251/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are not Fair Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17926/) (2023)
- [From Generation to Judgment: Opportunities and Challenges of LLM-as-a-judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.16594/) (2024)
- [Prometheus 2: An Open Source Language Model Specialized in Evaluating Other Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01535/) (2024)
- [JudgeBench: A Benchmark for Evaluating LLM-based Judges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.12784/) (2024)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models at Evaluating Instruction Following](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07641/) (2023)
- [InFoBench: Evaluating Instruction Following Ability in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.03601/) (2024)
- [Wider and Deeper LLM Networks are Fairer LLM Evaluators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.01862/) (2023)
- [Human Feedback is not Gold Standard](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16349/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Generation and Evaluation Capabilities of Large Language Models for Instruction Controllable Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.09184/) (2023)
- [TICKing All the Boxes: Generated Checklists Improve LLM Evaluation and Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03608/) (2024)
- [LLM Self-Correction with DeCRIM: Decompose, Critique, and Refine for Enhanced Following of Instructions with Multiple Constraints](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.06458/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Diagnosing the Reliability of LLM-as-a-Judge via Item Response Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.00521/) (2026)
- [Generating and Refining Dynamic Evaluation Rubrics for LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2605.30568/) (2026)
- [AutoChecklist: Composable Pipelines for Checklist Generation and Scoring with LLM-as-a-Judge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.07019/) (2026)
- [Automated Refinement of Essay Scoring Rubrics for Language Models via Reflect-and-Revise](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.09030/) (2025)
- [C2: Scalable Rubric-Augmented Reward Modeling from Binary Preferences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.13618/) (2026)
- [Grounded Checklist Partial Credit for Agent Skill Trajectories](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27487/) (2026)
- [ImpossibleRubrics: Stress-Testing Generated Rubrics as Reward Signals](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.16816/) (2026)
- [Gavel: Agent Meets Checklist for Evaluating LLMs on Long-Context Legal Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.04424/) (2026)
- [Judge Like Human Examiners: A Weighted Importance Multi-Point Evaluation Framework for Generative Tasks with Long-form Answers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.11246/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Automatic evaluation of generative tasks using large language models faces challenges due to ambiguous criteria. Although automatic checklist generation is a potentially promising approach, its usefulness remains underexplored. We investigate whether checklists should be used for all questions or selectively, generate them using six methods, evaluate their effectiveness across eight model sizes, and identify checklist items that correlate with human evaluations. Through experiments on pairwise comparison and direct scoring tasks, we find that selective checklist use tends to improve evaluation performance in pairwise settings, while its benefits are less consistent in direct scoring. Our analysis also shows that even checklist items with low correlation to human scores often reflect human-written criteria, indicating potential inconsistencies in human evaluation. These findings highlight the need to more clearly define objective evaluation criteria to guide both human and automatic evaluations. footnoteOur code is available at~https://github.com/momo0817/checklist-effectiveness-study