Learning an Efficient Multi-Turn Dialogue Evaluator from Multiple LLM Judges

Yuqi Tang, Kehua Feng, Yunfeng Wang, Zhiwen Chen, Chengfei lv, Gang Yu, Qiang Zhang, Keyan Ding, Huajun Chen


Abstract
Evaluating the conversational abilities of large language models (LLMs) remains a challenging task. Current mainstream approaches primarily rely on the “LLM-as-a-judge" paradigm, where an LLM is prompted to serve as an evaluator to assess dialogue quality. However, such methods often suffer from various biases, which undermine the reliability and consistency of the evaluation results. To mitigate these biases, recent methods employ multiple LLMs as judges and aggregate their judgments to select the optimal assessment. Although effective, this multi-judge approach incurs significant computational overhead during inference. In this paper, we propose an efficient multi-turn dialogue evaluator that captures the collective wisdom of multiple LLM judges by aggregating their preference knowledge into a single model. Our approach preserves the advantages of diverse multi-judge feedback while drastically reducing the evaluation cost, enabling fast and flexible dialogue quality assessment. Extensive experiments on seven single rating and pairwise comparison dialogue evaluation benchmarks demonstrate that our method outperforms existing baselines across diverse scenarios, showcasing its efficiency and robustness.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.188
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4304–4327
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.188/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuqi Tang, Kehua Feng, Yunfeng Wang, Zhiwen Chen, Chengfei lv, Gang Yu, Qiang Zhang, Keyan Ding, and Huajun Chen. 2026. Learning an Efficient Multi-Turn Dialogue Evaluator from Multiple LLM Judges. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 4304–4327, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning an Efficient Multi-Turn Dialogue Evaluator from Multiple LLM Judges (Tang et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.188.pdf