Topic-Specific Classifiers are Better Relevance Judges than Prompted LLMs
Abstract
The unjudged document problem, where systems that did not contribute to the original judgement pool may retrieve documents without a relevance judgement, is a key obstacle to the reuseability of test collections in information retrieval. While the de facto standard to deal with the problem is to treat unjudged documents as non-relevant, many alternatives have been proposed, such as the use of large language models (LLMs) as a relevance judge (LLM-as-a-judge). However, this has been criticized, among other things, as circular, since the same LLM can be used as the ranker and the judge. We propose to train topic-specific relevance classifiers instead: By finetuning monoT5 with independent LoRA weight adaptation on the judgments of a single assessor for a single topic's pool, we align it to that assessor's notion of relevance for the topic. The system rankings obtained through our classifier's relevance judgments achieve a Spearmans' $ρ$ correlation of $>0.94$ with ground truth system rankings. As little as 128 initial human judgments per topic suffice to improve the comparability of models, compared to treating unjudged documents as non-relevant, while achieving more reliability than existing LLM-as-a-judge approaches. Topic-specific relevance classifiers are thus a lightweight and straightforward way to tackle the unjudged document problem, while maintaining human judgments as the gold standard for retrieval evaluation. Code, models, and data are made openly available.
Assigned reviewers
| # | Reviewer | Match | Why (closest evidence publications in the taxonomy) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Falk Scholer | 43 | 62 On the Use of LLMs for Relevance Labelling (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction 62 Enhancing Human Annotation: Leveraging Large Language Models and Efficient Batch Processing (2024) User Behavior and Search Interaction 47 TREC: topic engineering exercise (2014) Test Collection Construction and Pooling |
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| 2 | Weiwei Sun 0001 | 39 | 54 MAIR: A Massive Benchmark for Evaluating Instructed Retrieval (2024) Evaluation Resources and Tools 45 TourRank: Utilizing Large Language Models for Documents Ranking with a Tournament-Inspired Strategy (2025) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking 43 Is ChatGPT Good at Search? Investigating Large Language Models as Re-Ranking Agents (2023) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking |
Area chair
| Area chair | Match | |
|---|---|---|
| Kam-Fai Wong | 36 |
Area-chair candidates (4)
| Kam-Fai Wong assigned | 36 | 6 papers | |
| Fernando Diaz 0001 | 36 | 12 papers | |
| Xiaoxi Li 0005 | 35 | 15 papers | |
| Zhijing Wu 0001 | 35 | 9 papers |
Candidates from the panel ranked by match score
| # | Reviewer | Match | Load | Why | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Paul Thomas 0001 COI: co-author | 63 | 3 | 100 System Comparison Using Automated Generation of Relevance Judgements in Multiple Languages (2025) LLM-Based Relevance Assessment 100 Enhancing Human Annotation: Leveraging Large Language Models and Efficient Batch Processing (2024) LLM-Based Relevance Assessment |
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| 2 | Tetsuya Sakai | 45 | 3 | 47 Give me just one highly relevant document: P-measure (2006) Evaluation Metrics and User Models 47 Summaries, ranked retrieval and sessions: a unified framework for information access evaluation (2013) Evaluation Metrics and User Models |
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| 3 | Negar Arabzadeh | 43 | 3 | 65 LLM-as-a-Judge in Entity Retrieval: Assessing Explicit and Implicit Relevance (2025) Entity Linking and Alignment 47 MS MARCO Chameleons: Challenging the MS MARCO Leaderboard with Extremely Obstinate Queries (2021) Test Collection Construction and Pooling |
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| 4 | Falk Scholer assigned | 43 | 3 | 62 On the Use of LLMs for Relevance Labelling (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction 62 Enhancing Human Annotation: Leveraging Large Language Models and Efficient Batch Processing (2024) User Behavior and Search Interaction |
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| 5 | Andrew Parry COI: co-author | 41 | 3 | 67 Large Language Model Relevance Assessors Agree With One Another More Than With Human Assessors (2025) LLM-Based Relevance Assessment 54 Corpus Subsampling: Estimating the Effectiveness of Neural Retrieval Models on Large Corpora (2025) Evaluation Resources and Tools |
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| 6 | Mark D. Smucker | 40 | 3 | 54 Evaluating sentence-level relevance feedback for high-recall information retrieval (2020) Evaluation Resources and Tools 54 A Preference Judgment Tool for Authoritative Assessment (2023) Evaluation Resources and Tools |
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| 7 | Rolf Jagerman | 39 | 3 | 100 Reliable Confidence Intervals for Information Retrieval Evaluation Using Generative A.I (2024) LLM-Based Relevance Assessment 74 Consolidating Ranking and Relevance Predictions of Large Language Models through Post-Processing (2024) LLM-Based Reranking |
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| 8 | Weiwei Sun 0001 assigned | 39 | 3 | 54 MAIR: A Massive Benchmark for Evaluating Instructed Retrieval (2024) Evaluation Resources and Tools 45 TourRank: Utilizing Large Language Models for Documents Ranking with a Tournament-Inspired Strategy (2025) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking |
|
| 9 | Yuchen Li 0006 | 38 | 3 | 49 ReasonRank: Empowering Passage Ranking with Strong Reasoning Ability (2026) LLM-Based Reranking 47 FULTR: A Large-Scale Fusion Learning to Rank Dataset and Its Application for Satisfaction-Oriented Ranking (2025) Web-Scale Learning to Rank |
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| 10 | Shengyao Zhuang COI: co-author | 38 | 3 | 49 Where Relevance Emerges: A Layer-Wise Study of Internal Attention for Zero-Shot Re-Ranking (2026) LLM-Based Reranking 49 A Setwise Approach for Effective and Highly Efficient Zero-shot Ranking with Large Language Models (2024) LLM-Based Reranking |
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| 11 | Xiao Wang 0043 | 38 | 3 | 46 Retrieve, Rerank, Answer, Experiment: Hands-On IR Research with PyTerrier (2026) Retrieval Toolkits and Reproducibility 41 Improving zero-shot retrieval using dense external expansion (2022) Query Reformulation and Expansion |
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| 12 | Idan Szpektor | 37 | 3 | 44 Improving recommendation for long-tail queries via templates (2011) Query Reformulation and Expansion 44 From query to question in one click: suggesting synthetic questions to searchers (2013) Query Reformulation and Expansion |
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| 13 | Weipeng Chen | 37 | 3 | 44 RichRAG: Crafting Rich Responses for Multi-faceted Queries in Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement 42 AITQE: An Adaptive Image-Text Quality Enhancer for Scalable MLLM Pretraining (2026) Multimodal Evaluation and Benchmarks |
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| 14 | Daiting Shi | 37 | 3 | 69 Utility-Focused LLM Annotation for Retrieval and Retrieval-Augmented Generation (2025) Evidence Selection and Context Refinement 49 TourRank: Utilizing Large Language Models for Documents Ranking with a Tournament-Inspired Strategy (2025) LLM-Based Reranking |
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| 15 | Leif Azzopardi COI: co-author | 37 | 3 | 43 Query Variation Performance Prediction for Systematic Reviews (2018) Query Performance Prediction 43 When is query performance prediction effective? (2009) Query Performance Prediction |
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| 16 | Farzad Shami | 36 | 3 | 50 Doctron: A Web-based Collaborative Annotation Tool for Ground Truth Creation in IR (2025) Retrieval Toolkits and Reproducibility 41 From Single to Multi-agent Reasoning: Advancing GeneGPT for Genomics QA (2026) Retrieval-Augmented and Open-Domain QA |
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| 17 | Shuaiqiang Wang COI: co-author | 36 | 3 | 41 Model Editing for New Document Integration in Generative Information Retrieval (2026) Generative Retrieval 39 GS2P: A Generative Pre-trained Learning to Rank Model with Over-parameterization for Web-Scale Search (Extended Abstract) (2024) Web-Scale Learning to Rank |
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| 18 | Di Wu 0054 | 36 | 3 | 39 Active Instruction Tuning: Improving Cross-Task Generalization by Training on Prompt Sensitive Tasks (2023) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation 39 Rethinking Model Selection and Decoding for Keyphrase Generation with Pre-trained Sequence-to-Sequence Models (2023) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation |
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| 19 | Gustavo Penha | 36 | 3 | 62 As It Was: Aligning LLM Search Evaluation with Historical User Preferences (2026) User Behavior and Search Interaction 42 PODTILE: Facilitating Podcast Episode Browsing with Auto-generated Chapters (2024) Multimodal Evaluation and Benchmarks |
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| 21 | Zhen Qin 0001 | 36 | 3 | 74 Consolidating Ranking and Relevance Predictions of Large Language Models through Post-Processing (2024) LLM-Based Reranking 41 Transformer Memory as a Differentiable Search Index (2022) Generative Retrieval |
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| 22 | Yanzhao Zhang | 36 | 3 | 49 Progressive Adaptation of Large Language Models for Multilingual Text Ranking (2026) Evaluation Resources and Tools 44 ERank: Fusing Supervised Fine-Tuning and Reinforcement Learning for Effective and Efficient Text Reranking (2026) LLM-Based Reranking |
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| 23 | Xueguang Ma | 36 | 3 | 44 Resources for Brewing BEIR: Reproducible Reference Models and Statistical Analyses (2024) Retrieval Toolkits and Reproducibility 43 Toward Best Practices for Training Multilingual Dense Retrieval Models (2024) Evaluation Resources and Tools |
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| 24 | Haokun Wen | 36 | 3 | 38 FiRE: Enhancing MLLMs with Fine-Grained Context Learning for Complex Image Retrieval (2025) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval 38 A Comprehensive Survey on Composed Image Retrieval (2026) Universal Multimodal Embedding and MLLM Retrieval |
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| 25 | Chen Zhao 0013 | 36 | 3 | 49 LimRank: Less is More for Reasoning-Intensive Information Reranking (2025) LLM-Based Reranking 42 Are Multimodal LLMs Robust Against Adversarial Perturbations? RoMMath: A Systematic Evaluation on Multimodal Math Reasoning (2025) Multimodal Evaluation and Benchmarks |
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| 27 | Ruqing Zhang 0001 COI: co-author | 36 | 3 | 41 Recent Advances in Generative Information Retrieval (2024) Generative Retrieval 41 Generative Retrieval Meets Multi-Graded Relevance (2024) Generative Retrieval |
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| 28 | Venktesh V | 36 | 3 | 49 Understanding the User: An Intent-Based Ranking Dataset (2024) Query Reformulation and Expansion 46 ir_explain: A Python Library of Explainable IR Methods (2025) Retrieval Toolkits and Reproducibility |
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| 30 | Adam Jatowt | 35 | 3 | 45 BracketRank: Large Language Model Document Ranking via Reasoning-based Competitive Elimination (2026) Reasoning-Intensive Retrieval and Ranking 42 Search Intent Discovery by Structurization of Community QA Contents (2012) Query Reformulation and Expansion |
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| 31 | Xi Ye 0003 | 35 | 3 | 41 Query-Focused Retrieval Heads Improve Long-Context Reasoning and Re-ranking (2025) Multi-hop and Complex Reasoning QA 39 Assessing Out-of-Domain Language Model Performance from Few Examples (2023) Language Model Pre-training and Adaptation |
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| 32 | Zihao Yue | 35 | 3 | 42 POLYCHARTQA: Benchmarking Large Vision-Language Models with Multilingual Chart Question Answering (2026) Multimodal Evaluation and Benchmarks 42 Less is More: Mitigating Multimodal Hallucination from an EOS Decision Perspective (2024) Multimodal Evaluation and Benchmarks |
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| 34 | Jialong Wu 0007 | 35 | 3 | 42 AdaCQR: Enhancing Query Reformulation for Conversational Search via Sparse and Dense Retrieval Alignment (2025) Query Reformulation and Expansion 42 AdaRewriter: Unleashing the Power of Prompting-based Conversational Query Reformulation via Test-Time Adaptation (2025) Query Reformulation and Expansion |