Codifying the Judge: Scalable Evaluation via Program Distillation

Abstract

arXiv:2607.22561v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: LLM-as-a-judge has become the standard for automated evaluation, but it suffers from high cost, significant latency, and opaque decisions -- limitations that undermine its scalability and reliability. We address these with a simple, efficient alternative: program distillation. Instead of prompting an LLM at the evaluation time, we distill its decision logic into a committee of programs that score candidates directly. These programmatic judges offer