arXiv:2605.23362v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating large language models increasingly relies on LLM-as-a-judge protocols, but such evaluations remain costly: different judges have different prices and reliabilities, and the difficulty of each prompt-response pair can vary substantially. This raises a basic allocation question: under a fixed budget, how should one distribute evaluation queries across heterogeneous judges and instances to obtain the most accurate score estimates? We formalize this question as budgeted heteroskedastic multi-judge estimation under independent, unbiased score observations. Given $K$ prompt-response pairs and $J$ judges with known costs but unknown query-judge variances, our goal is to estimate the bounded score vector while minimizing an $\ell_p$-error. Our first contribution is to analyze the inverse-variance weighted estimator (IVWE) and to derive the oracle allocation that minimizes its leading error bound. Since this allocation depends on the unknown variances, we then address the unknown-variance setting by proposing EST-IVWE, an adaptive algorithm that constructs and uses optimistic variance estimates to stabilize the empirical allocation. We prove that EST-IVWE matches the oracle IVWE rate up to lower-order terms in the budget. Our second and central theoretical contribution is a local minimax lower bound matching the leading allocation-dependent rate, establishing asymptotic instance-optimality up to logarithmic factors. An Assouad-type construction based on local, variance-preserving perturbations yields this bound both in expectation and with constant probability. A complementary Fano-type change-of-measure argument captures the logarithmic dependence on the confidence level with a different (suboptimal) allocation geometry. Finally, we numerically validate our approach on synthetic data and resampled HelpSteer2 evaluations, demonstrating improvements over na\"ive uniform allocation.