# VERA: Verdict-Conditioned Reliability for Adaptive LLM Judges

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05452 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.05452/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 25 of its 26 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Oct 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 25 of 25)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [On Calibration of Modern Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.04599/) (2017)
- [G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using GPT-4 with Better Human Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.16634/) (2023)
- [Language Models (Mostly) Know What They Know](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05221/) (2022)
- [Can LLMs Express Their Uncertainty? An Empirical Evaluation of Confidence Elicitation in LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13063/) (2023)
- [Just Ask for Calibration: Strategies for Eliciting Calibrated Confidence Scores from Language Models Fine-Tuned with Human Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14975/) (2023)
- [SelfCheckGPT: Zero-Resource Black-Box Hallucination Detection for Generative Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08896/) (2023)
- [ChatEval: Towards Better LLM-based Evaluators through Multi-Agent Debate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.07201/) (2023)
- [Self-Rewarding Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10020/) (2024)
- [Prometheus 2: An Open Source Language Model Specialized in Evaluating Other Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.01535/) (2024)
- [JudgeLM: Fine-tuned Large Language Models are Scalable Judges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.17631/) (2023)
- [Replacing Judges with Juries: Evaluating LLM Generations with a Panel of Diverse Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.18796/) (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)
- [Generative Judge for Evaluating Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.05470/) (2023)
- [Fine-tuned Language Models are Continual Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.12393/) (2022)
- [RewardBench 2: Advancing Reward Model Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.01937/) (2025)
- [Factual Confidence of LLMs: on Reliability and Robustness of Current Estimators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13415/) (2024)
- [InsCL: A Data-efficient Continual Learning Paradigm for Fine-tuning Large Language Models with Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11435/) (2024)
- [InternalInspector I2: Robust Confidence Estimation in LLMs through Internal States](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12053/) (2024)
- [Genetic Instruct: Scaling up Synthetic Generation of Coding Instructions for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21077/) (2024)
- [Don't Half-listen: Capturing Key-part Information in Continual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.10056/) (2024)
- [The Value Axis: Language Models Encode Whether They're on the Right Track](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.17056/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Accurately estimating judgment reliability is a central challenge in adapting LLM judges to newly verified feedback while preserving previously learned behavior. However, existing approaches often rely on output-level confidence, which can be overconfident and poorly aligned with judgment correctness. We propose VERA, a VErdict-conditioned Reliability Axis that estimates reliability from hidden activations by distinguishing correct from incorrect judgments within each predicted-verdict group. Using VERA as a control signal, we develop a VERA-guided periodic adaptation framework that integrates reliability-ranked corrective updates, reliability-residual replay, and periodic refresh of the reliability directions. After VERA-guided adaptation on Chatbot Arena, 8B- and 14B-parameter judges outperform the strongest baseline on each of four held-out public benchmarks, with relative gains of up to 23.01%. The framework also improves focal-class recall by up to 16.1% relative to the strongest adaptive baselines on a separate proprietary temporal auditing task.