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Adaptive Testing for LLM Evaluation: A Psychometric Alternative to Static Benchmarks

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arxiv 2511.04689 v3 pith:IQZRABNH submitted 2025-10-26 cs.CL cs.AI

Adaptive Testing for LLM Evaluation: A Psychometric Alternative to Static Benchmarks

classification cs.CL cs.AI
keywords abilityitemsatlasestimatesitemmodelsaccuraciesaccuracy
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Evaluating large language models (LLMs) typically requires thousands of benchmark items, making the process expensive, slow, and increasingly impractical at scale. Existing evaluation protocols rely on average accuracy over fixed item sets, treating all items as equally informative despite substantial variation in difficulty and discrimination. We introduce ATLAS, an adaptive testing framework based on Item Response Theory (IRT) that estimates model ability using Fisher information-guided item selection. ATLAS reduces the number of required items by up to 90% while maintaining measurement precision. For instance, it matches whole-bank ability estimates using only 41 items (0.157 MAE) on HellaSwag (5,600 items). We further reconstruct accuracy from ATLAS's ability estimates and find that reconstructed accuracies closely match raw accuracies across all five benchmarks, indicating that ability ${\theta}$ preserves the global performance structure. At the same time, ${\theta}$ provides finer discrimination within accuracy-equivalent models: among more than 3,000 evaluated models, 23-31% shift by more than 10 rank positions, and models with identical accuracies receive meaningfully different ability estimates. Code and calibrated item banks are available at https://github.com/Peiyu-Georgia-Li/ATLAS.git.

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