MLLM-as-a-Judge Exhibits Model Preference Bias

2026-04-13

AI Summary

This work addresses the issue of model-specific preference bias in multimodal large language models (MLLMs) when employed as evaluators, which can lead to unfair assessments. The authors propose Philautia-Eval, a novel framework that, for the first time, quantifies and reveals the widespread tendency of MLLMs to exhibit self-preference and mutual preference toward models from the same family. They identify connector reuse and overlap in instruction-tuning data as key contributing factors. Leveraging 1.29 million image-text rating pairs generated by 12 diverse MLLMs, the study introduces a preference disentanglement analysis method and proposes the Pomms ensemble strategy, which significantly mitigates preference bias while preserving evaluation performance.

Technology Category

Machine Learning: Large Multimodal Models (LMMs)Natural Language Processing: Interpretability, Analysis, and Evaluation of NLP ModelsKnowledge Representation and Reasoning: Preferences

Application Category

User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Fairness-aware retrieval and rankingSearch and Retrieval-Augmented AI: Web evaluation methodologies and metricsSemantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMs

Abstract

Automatic evaluation using multimodal large language models (MLLMs), commonly referred to as MLLM-as-a-Judge, has been widely used to measure model performance. If such MLLM-as-a-Judge methods were biased, they could distort model comparisons and benchmark-driven scientific progress. However, it remains unclear to what extent MLLM-as-a-Judge methods favor or disfavor text generated by specific MLLMs. In this study, we propose Philautia-Eval to investigate such model-specific preference bias. Philautia-Eval quantifies the degree of the bias by disentangling preference tendencies from differences in generation quality. Using 1.29M caption-score pairs collected from 12 MLLMs, we found that representative MLLMs tend to exhibit self-preference bias. Moreover, experimental results indicate mutual preference bias within particular model families, which is potentially driven by reused connectors and overlapping instruction-tuning resources. Finally, we introduce a simple ensemble of MLLMs, Pomms. Our results demonstrated that Pomms effectively mitigated the model-specific preference bias while maintaining performance.

Problem

• MLLM-as-a-Judge
• model preference bias
• automatic evaluation
• self-preference bias
• mutual preference bias

Innovation

• model preference bias
• MLLM-as-a-Judge
• Philautia-Eval
• self-preference bias
• Pomms