AI engineering glossary · Evals guardrails AI security
What is reference-free evaluation?
Reference-free evaluation (also called reference-less evaluation): Scoring an output without any stored correct answer, by judging properties such as fluency, faithfulness to a source, safety or usefulness. It is needed for open-ended tasks and live traffic where no gold answer exists, and usually relies on a model judge or on checks against the provided context.
Reference-free evaluation: an example
A production summariser has no gold summaries, so a judge checks whether each summary claim is supported by the original article.
Related terms
More Evals guardrails AI security terms
- Refusal rate
- Role-play jailbreak
- Rubric-based grading
- Safety evaluation
- Sandboxing
- Schema validation
- Self-preference bias
- Sensitive information disclosure
Where you learn it
Reference-free evaluation is part of the AI Engineering Program, which teaches it with notes, a hands-on lab and an exam. The first lesson is free.