Normalize judge totals to 0-1 scale

[luccathescientist]

Summary

This fixes an issue where LLM-judge scores could exceed 1.0 when the judge returned a total that was the sum of per-criterion scores instead of
their mean.

The grading pipeline already expects scores on a 0..1 scale, but some recent runs showed impossible values like 3.85/1.0, 5.0/1.0, and hybrid
scores above 1.0.

What changed

• Clarified the judge prompt so total must be the arithmetic mean of criterion scores and must remain in 0..1

• Normalized judge responses so that when:

  • per-criterion scores are in 0..1, and
  • the returned total is greater than 1.0

  we treat that total as a summed score and convert it back to the mean

• Added regression tests for:

  • summed LLM-judge totals being normalized back to 0..1
  • hybrid scoring staying within range after normalization

Evidence

Observed in saved benchmark runs:

• results/0009_local-openai-gpt-oss-20b.json
  • task_15_daily_summary: 3.85/1.0
  • task_16_email_triage: 2.8925/1.0
• results/0010_local-openai-gpt-oss-20b.json
  • task_15_daily_summary: 5.0/1.0
  • task_17_email_search: 3.39/1.0

In these cases, the criterion breakdowns were already on a 0..1 scale, so the overflowing totals were consistent with summed judge outputs leaking
into aggregate scoring.

Validation

python3 -m py_compile scripts/lib_grading.py tests/test_lib_grading.py
python3 -m unittest tests/test_lib_grading.py

[kilo-code-bot]

Code Review Summary

Status: No Issues Found | Recommendation: Merge

The normalization logic is well-guarded: it only fires when all criterion scores are individually within [0.0, 1.0] AND the reported total exceeds 1.0, which correctly distinguishes summed totals from legitimately high scores on a wider scale. The prompt clarification is a sensible belt-and-suspenders approach alongside the runtime normalization.

The regression tests cover the primary fix path. One minor gap is the absence of a negative test (e.g., criteria scored on a 0..5 scale with total > 1.0 should NOT be normalized), but the guard condition all(0.0 <= float(v) <= 1.0 for v in values) handles that correctly.

Files Reviewed (2 files)

• scripts/lib_grading.py - 0 issues
• tests/test_lib_grading.py - 0 issues

---

_{Reviewed by claude-4.6-opus-20260205 · 173,890 tokens}

[olearycrew]

@luccathescientist thanks for this contribution!