# Will the Judge Flip? Predicting Position-Sensitive LLM Judgments from Residual Stream Activations

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07115 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.07115/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Probing deception, bias and beliefs, one of 13 directions in Mechanistic interpretability.
- Builds on 5 of its 12 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2026.

## Placed in

- Mechanistic interpretability / [Probing deception, bias and beliefs](https://mlsanity.com/mechinterp/probing-deception-bias-and-beliefs/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [The Llama 3 Herd of Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.21783/) (2024)
- [Qwen3 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.09388/) (2025)
- [Beyond the Surface: Enhancing LLM-as-a-Judge Alignment with Human via Internal Representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.03550/) (2025)
- [Calibrating LLM Judges: Linear Probes for Fast and Reliable Uncertainty Estimation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22245/) (2025)
- [Opening LLM Judges: Recovering Preference Signals Beyond the Final Verdict](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.32407/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The order in which candidate responses are presented can change an LLM judge's verdict. Detecting such a position flip ordinarily requires judging each pair in both orders, which doubles the number of judgments. We investigate whether residual stream activations recorded immediately before the initial verdict can predict a flip. We use nested grouped cross-validation to evaluate regularized linear probes on 534 JudgeBench pairs for three Qwen3 judges and Llama-3.1-8B. The linear probes achieve AUROCs of .621-.850 and outperform a combined baseline that uses verbalized confidence, verdict-label logits, response lengths, and the judge's initial choice by .062-.113 AUROC. Linear probes trained on JudgeBench and then frozen achieve AUROCs of .685-.853 on 1,802 MT-Bench comparisons without MT-Bench fitting or recalibration. These results show that pre-verdict activations support prediction of susceptibility to candidate order and outperform the non-activation predictors evaluated here.