When LLMs Benchmark Themselves: Deconstructing Self-Bias in Automated Evaluation

Abstract

As LLMs rapidly saturate existing benchmarks, automated benchmark creation using LLMs (LLM-as-a-benchmark) -- where a model generates test inputs (LLM-as-a-testset) and evaluates outputs (LLM-as-an-evaluator) -- has gained traction as a cheap alternative to human curation. We show that this paradigm has a fundamental problem: LLM-generated benchmarks systematically favor the model that created them. Using machine translation as our primary testbed, we find that self-bias arises from two additive sources, LLM-as-a-testset and LLM-as-an-evaluator, and their combination amplifies the effect. Crucially, even when test data is generated with explicit diversity controls, each model's implicit stylistic tendencies produce homogeneous, model-specific outputs that inflate its own scores. Increasing source text diversity, using our proposed diversity metric, partially mitigates this bias. Self-bias is strong enough to cause each model to rank itself first, overriding the peer-consensus ordering. We confirm that the phenomenon extends to open-ended generation on the Chatbot Arena task.