Agents-as-Peers: Bias-Controlled LLM Evaluation as Multi-Agent Peer Assessment

arXiv:2602.02589v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) evaluation commonly relies on fixed human-authored benchmarks or centralized human/model judges. Fixed benchmarks can age and enter model training corpora, while centralized judges introduce their own scoring preferences. We cast LLM evaluation as a multi-agent peer-assessment problem and introduce Agents-as-Peers, a distributed evaluation protocol in which every agent generates tasks, answers the shared task set, and judges the answers of its peers, with no privileged evaluator. Self-ratings are excluded from the ranking, and judging is repeated under controlled identity and presentation regimes so that self bias, identity effects, presentation-position sensitivity, and judge severity are measured rather than left implicit. In an instantiation with 12 LLMs and 420 agent-generated questions, Agents-as-Peers aggregates 55,440 non-self peer judgments per regime. Most agents assign their own answers higher scores than those answers receive from peer judges; visible identity changes scores for some agents; the first fixed answer slot is associated with scores 0.39 points higher than the shuffled baseline; and judges differ markedly in severity. On labeled benchmarks, peer scores align strongly with accuracy on TruthfulQA (Pearson r=0.904) and GSM8K (r=0.873). On TruthfulQA, the peer-score correlation is substantially higher than the self-score correlation (r=0.538). A benchmark-overlap screen and item-level human audit further characterize the endogenous task set. These results support Agents-as-Peers as a cohort-relative measurement protocol whose ranking is reported together with the biases and rater effects that shape it. Code and dataset: https://github.com/caura-ai/caura-PeerRank