Which Metrics Save the Most Human Annotation? Prediction-Powered Evaluation and Meta-Evaluation

2026-08-27

AI Summary

论文提出预测驱动评估框架，结合少量人工判断和大规模自动评分，解决非验证任务中人工评估成本高、自动度量有偏的问题。

Abstract

Across various non-verifiable tasks, human evaluation is reliable but expensive, while automatic metrics are more scalable but often biased. Building on prediction-powered inference (PPI), we propose prediction-powered evaluation, a framework that combines limited human judgments with large-scale automatic scores to obtain data-efficient system comparisons that are provably unbiased. We develop parametric and non-parametric procedures, analyze the efficiency trade-off between paired and unpaired designs, and validate the framework on six WMT datasets. We further introduce the Prediction-Powered Saving Ratio (PPSR), a meta-metric that measures how much human annotation an automatic metric can save when used within prediction-powered evaluation. PPSR directly targets metric utility for prediction-powered evaluation and yields more discriminative and stable metric rankings than existing system-level meta-metrics. Overall, our new paradigm reframes automatic metrics as tools for reducing human annotation cost rather than replacing human judgment, and applies broadly to non-verifiable tasks.

Problem

• human evaluation
• automatic metrics
• unbiased comparison

Innovation

• Prediction-Powered Evaluation
• Prediction-Powered Saving Ratio (PPSR)
• Unbiased System Comparisons