  As Large Language Models (LLMs) have become more advanced, they have outpaced
our abilities to accurately evaluate their quality. Not only is finding data to
adequately probe particular model properties difficult, but evaluating the
correctness of a model's freeform generation alone is a challenge. To address
this, many evaluations now rely on using LLMs themselves as judges to score the
quality of outputs from other LLMs. Evaluations most commonly use a single
large model like GPT4. While this method has grown in popularity, it is costly,
has been shown to introduce intramodel bias, and in this work, we find that
very large models are often unnecessary. We propose instead to evaluate models
using a Panel of LLm evaluators (PoLL). Across three distinct judge settings
and spanning six different datasets, we find that using a PoLL composed of a
larger number of smaller models outperforms a single large judge, exhibits less
intra-model bias due to its composition of disjoint model families, and does so
while being over seven times less expensive.
