Can Many-Shot In-Context Learning Help LLMs as Evaluators? A Preliminary Empirical Study

Abstract

Utilizing Large Language Models (LLMs) as evaluators to assess the performance of other LLMs has garnered attention. However, this evaluation approach is affected by potential biases within LLMs, raising concerns about the accuracy and reliability of the evaluation results of LLMs. To address this issue, we propose and explore two many-shot In-Context Learning (ICL) prompt templates to help LLM evaluators mitigate potential biases: Many-Shot with Reference (MSwR) and Many-Shot without Reference (MSoR). Specifically, the former utilizes in-context examples with model-generated rationales as references, while the latter does not include these references. Using these prompt designs, we investigate the impact of increasing the number of in-context examples on the consistency and quality of the evaluation results. Experimental results show that advanced LLMs, such as GPT-4, perform better in the many-shot regime than in the zero-shot regime. Furthermore, in most cases, MSwR performs significantly better than MSoR.