🎯Core Definition
Pairwise Evaluation (Head-to-Head Comparison) is an assessment paradigm where anonymized responses from two candidate models (Model A vs Model B) for the same prompt are presented side-by-side to a judge LLM (or human annotator) to declare a winner (`Model A`, `Model B`, or `Tie`); aggregate results across large prompt test suites synthesize win-rate matrices or feed Bradley-Terry probability models to derive global capability rankings.
💡Use Cases
Model version A/B testing, leaderboard benchmarks (LMSYS Chatbot Arena), and RLHF preference dataset creation for DPO/PPO alignment.
⚡Key Problems Solved
Pointwise absolute scores suffer severe scale drift and high variance across evaluations; relative head-to-head comparison exhibits far higher human agreement and judge sensitivity, reliably resolving subtle quality differences.