Rank Reversal in Multilingual LLM Judges: A Label-Free Double-Centering Calibrator

Abstract

Multilingual LLM judges produce different evaluator-backbone rankings depending on the prompt language: on an eight-language Agent-as-a-Judge benchmark, the top-ranked backbone alternates across English, Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Spanish, Turkish, and Swahili, and 7 of 15 backbone pairs show statistically significant pairwise rank reversal. We treat this as a measurement problem. The multilingual judge score decomposes additively into task difficulty, backbone skill, and a language-backbone interaction term, the last of which is recoverable without human labels by double-centering the cell-mean score matrix. We make this estimator (\textbf{Consensus-Based Calibration}, CBC) explicit, give an $O(1/\sqrt{n})$ finite-sample concentration bound with variance constant $(1-\tfrac{1}{m})(1-\tfrac{1}{k})$, and show that it is unbiased even when task-language interactions are present. Across 7{,}920 judge runs (6 backbones, 8 languages, 55 tasks, 3 frameworks), CBC raises held-out cross-task rank consistency $\tau$ from 0.650 to 0.902 and agrees with the held-out additive-model oracle in 100\% of per-language decisions versus 68.5\% raw; these are consistency diagnostics, not human-grounded correctness measures. On a separately collected M-RewardBench panel (7 languages, 1{,}500 items per language, 10{,}500 language-item instances, 5 evaluators), panel agreement with the public human gold preferences rises from 68.7\% to 76.6\% (gain 7.9 percentage points, 95\% CI $[6.0, 9.9]$), our strongest external evidence of downstream usefulness. The estimator is the standard two-way ANOVA interaction-recovery operation under sum-to-zero contrasts; our contribution is its application as a label-free post-hoc calibrator for multilingual LLM judges, an explicit finite-sample concentration bound, and an unbiasedness result that holds even under task-language misspecification.