Custom LLM Judge
How to run prompt-based evaluators for custom criteria.
LLM-based descriptors use an external LLM for evaluation. You can:
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Use built-in evaluators (with pre-written prompts), or
-
Run evals for custom criteria you configure.
Pre-requisites:
- You know how to use descriptors to evaluate text data.
Imports
Built-in LLM evals
Available descriptors. Check all available built-in LLM evals in the reference table.
There are built-in evaluators for popular criteria, like detecting toxicity or if the text contains a refusal. These built-in descriptors:
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Default to binary classifiers.
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Default to using
gpt-4o-mini
model from OpenAI. -
Return a label, the reasoning for the decision, and an optional score.
OpenAI key. Add the token as the environment variable: see docs.
Run a single-column eval. For example, to evaluate whether response
contains any toxicity:
View the results as usual:
Example output:
Run a multi-column eval. Some evaluators naturally require two columns. For example, to evaluate Context Quality (“does it have enough information to answer the question?”), you must run this evaluation over your context
column, and pass the question
column as a parameter.
Example output:
Parametrize evaluators. You can switch the output format from category
to score
(0 to 1) or exclude the reasoning to get only the label:
Column names. The alias you set defines the column name with the category. If you enable the score result as well, it will get the “Alias score” name.
Change the LLM. To choose to use a different model for the evals.
Custom LLM evals
You can also create a custom LLM evaluator using the provided templates:
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Choose a template.
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Specify the evaluation criteria (grading logic and names of categories)
Evidently will then generate the complete evaluation prompt to send to the selected LLM together with the evaluation data.
Evaluate a single column
Binary classification template. For example, to evaluate if the text is “concise”:
You do not need to explicitly ask the LLM to classify your input into two classes, return reasoning, or format the output. This is already part of the Evidently template.
To apply this descriptor for your data, pass the template
name to the LLMEval
descriptor:
Publish results as usual:
Another example. This template is very flexible. For instance, you can use to decide if the question is appropriate to the scope of your LLM application. A simplified prompt:
Apply the template:
Example output:
Evaluate multiple columns
A custom evaluator can also use multiple columns. To implement this, mention the second {column_name}
inside your evaluation criteria.
Example. To evaluate if the response is faithful to the context:
You do not need to include the primary column name in the evaluation prompt, since it’s already part of the template. You choose this column when you apply the descriptor.
When applying the descriptor, include the second column using the additional_columns
parameter:
Get the results as usual:
Example output:
Parameters
LLMEval
Parameter | Description | Options |
---|---|---|
template | Sets a specific template for evaluation. | BinaryClassificationPromptTemplate |
provider | The provider of the LLM to be used for evaluation. | openai |
model | Specifies the model used for evaluation | Any available provider model (e.g., gpt-3.5-turbo , gpt-4 ) |
additional_columns | A dictionary of additional columns present in your dataset to include in the evaluation prompt. Use it to map the column name to the placeholder name you reference in the criteria . For example: ({"mycol": "question"} . | Custom dictionary (optional) |
BinaryClassificationPromptTemplate
Parameter | Description | Options |
---|---|---|
criteria | Free-form text defining evaluation criteria. | Custom string (required) |
target_category | Name of the target category you want to detect (e.g., you care about its precision/recall more than the other). The choice of “target” category has no impact on the evaluation itself. However, it can be useful for later quality evaluations of your LLM judge. | Custom category (required) |
non_target_category | Name of the non-target category. | Custom category (required) |
uncertainty | Category to return when the provided information is not sufficient to make a clear determination. | unknown (Default), target , non_target |
include_reasoning | Specifies whether to include the LLM-generated explanation of the result. | True (Default), False |
pre_messages | List of system messages that set context or instructions before the evaluation task. Use it to explain the evaluator role (“you are an expert..”) or context (“your goal is to grade the work of an intern..”). | Custom string (optional) |