English

Correcting Selection Bias in Sparse User Feedback for Large Language Model Quality Estimation: A Multi-Agent Hierarchical Bayesian Approach

Computation and Language 2026-05-13 v1

Abstract

[Abridged] Production LLM deployments receive feedback from a non-random fraction of users: thumbs sit mostly in the tails of the satisfaction distribution, and a naive average over them can land 40-50 percentage points away from true system quality. We treat this as a topic- and sentiment- stratified selection-bias problem and propose a three-agent hierarchical Bayesian pipeline that does not require ground-truth labels on individual interactions. A Topic Clustering Agent partitions the stream via UMAP + HDBSCAN over text embeddings; a Bias Modeling Agent fits a two-stage hierarchical Beta-Binomial under NUTS, inferring per-topic selection rates scs_c and quality qcq_c with partial pooling; a Synthesis Agent reweights qcq_c by true topic prevalence π^c=nc/N\hat\pi_c = n_c/N to report a bias-corrected aggregate posterior Qˉ=cπ^cqc\bar Q = \sum_c \hat\pi_c q_c with credible interval, plus drift signals for online recalibration. Validation uses UltraFeedback (N=10,232 retained interactions, C=18C=18 clusters, Q=0.6249Q^\star=0.6249) with simulated topic- and sentiment-dependent selection biases. We compare five Bayesian variants against Naive and IPW baselines. A mild prior on the feedback channel (typical positive-feedback rate and negative-to-positive ratio, both readable from any production dashboard without labels) keeps Hierarchical-Informed within 4-13 pp of QQ^\star as the bias ratio sweeps from 1:1 to 30:1, with 95% credible intervals covering QQ^\star in 50/50 random-seed replicates at κmax=10\kappa_{\max}=10. Without channel-side priors, every weak-prior variant misses QQ^\star by 22-33 pp: the per-cluster sufficient statistics admit a one-parameter family of equally good fits, and the prior on the bias channel (not on latent quality) is what breaks the degeneracy.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.12177,
  title  = {Correcting Selection Bias in Sparse User Feedback for Large Language Model Quality Estimation: A Multi-Agent Hierarchical Bayesian Approach},
  author = {Andrea Morandi and Mahesh Viswanathan},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.12177},
  year   = {2026}
}