@inproceedings{zhang-2026-atomic,
title = "Atomic and Holistic {LLM} Judges for Reference-Grounded Support Labels: A Prompt-Controlled Comparison",
author = "Zhang, Xinran",
editor = "Zhang, Yue and
Xu, Ruifeng and
Purwarianti, Ayu and
Rong, Tong and
Suzuki, Jun",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the {A}sia-Pacific Chapter of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = nov,
year = "2026",
address = "Hengqin, China",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.60/",
pages = "1281--1300",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-439-2",
abstract = "When an LLM judge only has to assign a three-way support label to a candidate answer given a reference, does asking it to decompose the answer into atomic claims help, and at what cost? We compare four single-call designs that share the judge model, the inputs, and the level of instruction detail: candidate-side atomic decomposition, a matched holistic rubric, reference-side decomposition that checks whether each reference claim is covered, and a bidirectional combination. Support labels are constructed from TruthfulQA, ASQA, and QAMPARI references (200 questions and 400 rows per dataset). All four designs are run with Opus-4.6, GPT-4.1, and Gemini Flash Lite; Sonnet-4.6 is added for the candidate-side and holistic designs. Candidate-side decomposition is weak where the label depends on completeness: the holistic rubric is more accurate on ASQA and QAMPARI for every judge while using fewer tokens. Reference-side decomposition is 12.5-21.3 points more accurate than holistic on ASQA for 28-29{\%} more tokens, and stays near the holistic ceiling on QAMPARI at 63-69{\%} more. On TruthfulQA misconceptions, candidate-side decomposition is competitive and significantly better for two judges. On a 60-row single-author subset whose labels are looser than strict reference completeness, candidate-side decomposition edges ahead of holistic for every judge, reversing the construction-label order. What a judge decomposes should follow what the label measures."
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<abstract>When an LLM judge only has to assign a three-way support label to a candidate answer given a reference, does asking it to decompose the answer into atomic claims help, and at what cost? We compare four single-call designs that share the judge model, the inputs, and the level of instruction detail: candidate-side atomic decomposition, a matched holistic rubric, reference-side decomposition that checks whether each reference claim is covered, and a bidirectional combination. Support labels are constructed from TruthfulQA, ASQA, and QAMPARI references (200 questions and 400 rows per dataset). All four designs are run with Opus-4.6, GPT-4.1, and Gemini Flash Lite; Sonnet-4.6 is added for the candidate-side and holistic designs. Candidate-side decomposition is weak where the label depends on completeness: the holistic rubric is more accurate on ASQA and QAMPARI for every judge while using fewer tokens. Reference-side decomposition is 12.5-21.3 points more accurate than holistic on ASQA for 28-29% more tokens, and stays near the holistic ceiling on QAMPARI at 63-69% more. On TruthfulQA misconceptions, candidate-side decomposition is competitive and significantly better for two judges. On a 60-row single-author subset whose labels are looser than strict reference completeness, candidate-side decomposition edges ahead of holistic for every judge, reversing the construction-label order. What a judge decomposes should follow what the label measures.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Atomic and Holistic LLM Judges for Reference-Grounded Support Labels: A Prompt-Controlled Comparison
%A Zhang, Xinran
%Y Zhang, Yue
%Y Xu, Ruifeng
%Y Purwarianti, Ayu
%Y Rong, Tong
%Y Suzuki, Jun
%S Proceedings of the 15th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 5th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
%D 2026
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Hengqin, China
%@ 979-8-89176-439-2
%F zhang-2026-atomic
%X When an LLM judge only has to assign a three-way support label to a candidate answer given a reference, does asking it to decompose the answer into atomic claims help, and at what cost? We compare four single-call designs that share the judge model, the inputs, and the level of instruction detail: candidate-side atomic decomposition, a matched holistic rubric, reference-side decomposition that checks whether each reference claim is covered, and a bidirectional combination. Support labels are constructed from TruthfulQA, ASQA, and QAMPARI references (200 questions and 400 rows per dataset). All four designs are run with Opus-4.6, GPT-4.1, and Gemini Flash Lite; Sonnet-4.6 is added for the candidate-side and holistic designs. Candidate-side decomposition is weak where the label depends on completeness: the holistic rubric is more accurate on ASQA and QAMPARI for every judge while using fewer tokens. Reference-side decomposition is 12.5-21.3 points more accurate than holistic on ASQA for 28-29% more tokens, and stays near the holistic ceiling on QAMPARI at 63-69% more. On TruthfulQA misconceptions, candidate-side decomposition is competitive and significantly better for two judges. On a 60-row single-author subset whose labels are looser than strict reference completeness, candidate-side decomposition edges ahead of holistic for every judge, reversing the construction-label order. What a judge decomposes should follow what the label measures.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.60/
%P 1281-1300
Markdown (Informal)
[Atomic and Holistic LLM Judges for Reference-Grounded Support Labels: A Prompt-Controlled Comparison](https://aclanthology.org/2026.aacl-long.60/) (Zhang, AACL-IJCNLP 2026)
ACL