Benchmarking LLM-as-a-Judge for Long-Form Output Evaluation

Junjie Chen, Yuxi Dong, Haitao Li, Weihang Su, Yujia Zhou, Min Zhang, Yiqun Liu, Qingyao Ai


Abstract
As large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for long-form generation, reliably evaluating long-form outputs has become a critical challenge. LLM-as-a-judge offers a scalable alternative to human evaluation, yet its reliability in long-form output evaluation remains underexamined: existing meta-evaluation benchmarks focus mainly on short-form outputs. Compared with short-form evaluation, long-form evaluation is not merely a matter of output length; it often requires judges to handle more complex document-level demands. In this work, we introduce LongJudgeBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating LLM judges on long-form outputs across diverse real-world scenarios and judging protocols. We systematically evaluate a broad range of LLM judges, covering multiple base models and judging settings. Our results reveal a substantial reliability gap: current LLM judges remain unstable across scenarios, and rubrics or references are helpful but not always sufficient. We hope LongJudgeBench will support future research on more robust, context-aware, and human-aligned LLM-as-a-judge methods. Our code is available at https://github.com/cjj826/LongJudgeBench.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.473
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:
10856–10873
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.473/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Junjie Chen, Yuxi Dong, Haitao Li, Weihang Su, Yujia Zhou, Min Zhang, Yiqun Liu, and Qingyao Ai. 2026. Benchmarking LLM-as-a-Judge for Long-Form Output Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 10856–10873, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Benchmarking LLM-as-a-Judge for Long-Form Output Evaluation (Chen et al., EMNLP 2026)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.473.pdf