When LLM Judges Inflate Scores: Exploring Overrating in Relevance Assessment

Abstract: Human relevance assessment is time-consuming and cognitively intensive, limiting the scalability of Information Retrieval evaluation. This has led to growing interest in using LLMs as proxies for human judges. However, it remains an open question whether LLM-based relevance judgments are reliable, stable, and rigorous enough to match humans for relevance assessment. In this work, we conduct a systematic study of overrating behavior in LLM-based relevance judgments across model backbones, evaluation paradigms (pointwise and pairwise), and passage modification strategies. We show that models consistently assign inflated relevance scores -- often with high confidence -- to passages that do not genuinely satisfy the underlying information need, revealing a system-wide bias rather than random fluctuations in judgment. Furthermore, controlled experiments show that LLM-based relevance judgments can be highly sensitive to passage length and surface-level lexical cues. These results raise concerns about the usage of LLMs as drop-in replacements for human relevance assessors, and highlight the urgent need for careful diagnostic evaluation frameworks when applying LLMs for relevance assessments. Our code and results are publicly available.