Curriculum Learning based Hierarchical Scoring and Analysis Framework for Question Answering Task Evaluation
PDF ↗The rapid progress of large language models (LLMs) has increased the demand for efficient and reliable evaluation of question answering (QA) systems. Existing evaluation methods either rely on rule-based matching with shallow semantic understanding or adopt LLM-as-a-Judge approaches that incur high cost and latency while offering limited error interpretability. Accordingly, we propose HiEval, a curriculum learning based hierarchical framework for QA task evaluation that supports both quick scoring and fine-grained error analysis. HiEval contains a quick scoring model (HiEval-QS) that predicts three-level correctness labels, and an error analysis model (HiEval-EA) that identifies incorrect responses into five error types. HiEval incorporates a class-balanced focal loss to handle label imbalance, experience replay to prevent forgetting, and contrastive unlikelihood optimization to improve error discrimination. We also construct two large-scale human-annotated evaluation datasets collected from 50 QA-related datasets, covering 8 task types and release two challenging benchmarks. Extensive experiments show that HiEval achieves state-of-the-art performance on both quick scoring and error analysis tasks, outperforming all baseline methods, including GPT-5, while being approximately 25\times faster.