arXiv:2609.05423v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Automated assessment of mobile user interface quality is attractive because manual review does not scale, and large language models are increasingly proposed for the task. Whether their ratings correspond to those produced by established rule-based heuristics has not been characterised at scale. We construct a 15,000-screen corpus from the RICO dataset using six documented filters, score every screen with a literature-grounded heuristic scorer, and collect ratings from three open-weight language models across two input representations, yielding 270,000 ratings. We report linearly weighted Cohen's kappa with bootstrap confidence intervals, offset-corrected kappa, intraclass correlation, and Bland-Altman limits of agreement, together with a chance baseline for the tolerance-band agreement rule. Agreement between the two rating sources is consistently weak: raw kappa falls below 0.15 in seventeen of eighteen model-representation-dimension cells. However, fifteen of eighteen cells are statistically distinguishable from zero, and correcting for a constant offset raises five cells above 0.15, so the divergence is better described as a combination of systematic bias and weak covariation than as absence of relationship. Model ratings track structural properties of the interface, but substantially less strongly than the heuristic does, and more strongly from an untruncated structural element list than from a screenshot. We further show that dimensions elicited in a single generated response are correlated by construction, reaching rho = 0.97 in one condition, which constrains what such designs can measure. We report these results as a characterisation of divergence between two automated raters rather than as evidence that either is correct, and we set out the validation a stronger claim would require.
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