SANE: Automated Scorer-Specific Metamorphic Testing for LLM Judges

LLM judges increasingly mediate benchmark evaluation, model selection, data curation, and training.

Their decisions are useful only when each judge responds reliably to changes affecting its scoring criterion.

Existing methods for reliability testing perturb inputs with known expected effects on judge scores.

Prominent LLM-judge testing harnesses combine human-authored perturbation recipes with synthetic test generation, leaving scorer-specific recipe ideation outside the automated pipeline.

This limits their use to fixed perturbations and pre-assumed scorer types.

We introduce SANE, an agent-based framework that encodes behavioral requirements for stochastic evaluators as reusable agent instructions.

Given a scorer specification, implementation, and representative inputs, the pipeline first identifies scorer-specific capabilities, then automatically derives perturbation recipes and expected score relations for each.

SANE also defines a scorer-independent validation framework for generated judge tests.

It determines whether each recipe agrees with scorer intent and whether each instantiated case realizes the recipe and supports its expected relation.

Because SANE generates a recipe inventory tailored to each scorer, the number of aligned recipes grows as scorers are added.

Across five domains, SANE produces 3.7 times as many validated test families as the Judge Reliability Harness (JRH) at comparable end-to-end validity and detects scorer deficiencies in every domain, including professionalism and toxicity, where JRH detects none.

On faithfulness, SANE achieves strong human alignment in judge ranking: its test-suite scores rank 11 judge models consistently with human-labeled FaithBench performance (Spearman rho = 0.852), while JRH does not (rho = 0.100).