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Reliable and Efficient Amortized Model-based Evaluation

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arxiv 2503.13335 v1 pith:OXEKTXIB submitted 2025-03-17 cs.CL cs.AIcs.LGstat.AP

Reliable and Efficient Amortized Model-based Evaluation

classification cs.CL cs.AIcs.LGstat.AP
keywords difficultyquestionbenchmarkquestionsreliableaverageevaluationsscore
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Comprehensive evaluations of language models (LM) during both development and deployment phases are necessary because these models possess numerous capabilities (e.g., mathematical reasoning, legal support, or medical diagnostic) as well as safety risks (e.g., racial bias, toxicity, or misinformation). The average score across a wide range of benchmarks provides a signal that helps guide the use of these LMs in practice. Currently, holistic evaluations are costly due to the large volume of benchmark questions, making frequent evaluations impractical. A popular attempt to lower the cost is to compute the average score on a subset of the benchmark. This approach, unfortunately, often renders an unreliable measure of LM performance because the average score is often confounded with the difficulty of the questions in the benchmark subset. Item response theory (IRT) was designed to address this challenge, providing a reliable measurement by careful controlling for question difficulty. Unfortunately, question difficulty is expensive to estimate. Facing this challenge, we train a model that predicts question difficulty from its content, enabling a reliable measurement at a fraction of the cost. In addition, we leverage this difficulty predictor to further improve the evaluation efficiency through training a question generator given a difficulty level. This question generator is essential in adaptive testing, where, instead of using a random subset of the benchmark questions, informative questions are adaptively chosen based on the current estimation of LLM performance. Experiments on 22 common natural language benchmarks and 172 LMs show that this approach is more reliable and efficient compared to current common practice.

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Cited by 13 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. Item Response Scaling Laws: A Measurement Theory Approach for Efficient and Generalizable Neural Scaling Estimation

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    IRSL applies IRT to reduce scaling law estimation from O(M×N) to O(M+N) parameters, enabling reliable estimates with only 50 questions per benchmark after calibration and generalizable ability scores across related be...

  2. AGC-Bench: Measuring Artificial General Creativity

    cs.CL 2026-07 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    AGC-Bench introduces a multi-domain creativity benchmark for LLMs, recovers a general 'c' factor explaining 81.5% of variance, and finds humans still outperform top models on matched tasks.

  3. AGC-Bench: Measuring Artificial General Creativity

    cs.CL 2026-07 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    AGC-Bench standardizes measurement of LLM creativity across domains, recovers a dominant 'c' factor explaining 81.5% variance separable from reasoning, and shows humans still lead on matched tasks.

  4. Quality Is Not a Safety Proxy Under Quantization

    cs.LG 2026-06 conditional novelty 6.0

    Across 51 quantized checkpoints, quality metrics fail to predict safety drops in 36 pairings and 10 hidden-danger cases, while a new RTSI screen routes all 10 dangerous rows to testing at matched bucket size.

  5. Consistent and Distinctive: LLM Benchmark Efficiency via Maximum Independent Set Prompt Selection on Similarity Graphs

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A graph-based MIS prompt selection method on embedding similarity graphs yields reduced benchmark subsets with highly consistent LLM rankings (Kendall's W ≥ 0.90 in 99.2% of cases) and 25-48% size reduction at higher ...

  6. Why Do Safety Guardrails Degrade Across Languages?

    cs.CL 2026-05 conditional novelty 6.0

    A latent variable IRT framework decouples four safety-driving factors across 61 model configurations and 10 languages using 1.9 million evaluations, revealing that safety is largely unidimensional and that high cross-...

  7. Beyond Fixed Benchmarks and Worst-Case Attacks: Dynamic Boundary Evaluation for Language Models

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Dynamic Boundary Evaluation locates each LLM's performance boundary at ~50% pass probability via a calibrated item bank and Skill-Guided Boundary Search algorithm to enable unified, adaptive evaluations across safety,...

  8. Beyond Fixed Benchmarks and Worst-Case Attacks: Dynamic Boundary Evaluation for Language Models

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Dynamic Boundary Evaluation adaptively identifies each LLM's performance boundary on a shared difficulty scale using a calibrated item bank and a search algorithm.

  9. Growing Pains: Extensible and Efficient LLM Benchmarking Via Fixed Parameter Calibration

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    A fixed-parameter multidimensional IRT calibration approach allows extending LLM benchmark suites over time, predicting full performance within 2-3 points and preserving rankings (Spearman ρ ≥ 0.9) using only 100 anch...

  10. Latent Confidence Alignment for LLM Self-Assessment

    cs.CY 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    LCAE is introduced as a Rasch-model metric that aligns LLM self-reported confidence with latent error probability derived from ability and item difficulty, shown to improve calibration on a medical dataset across 20 models.

  11. Deployment-Centered Evaluation: Predicting Query-Level Rejection Risk in a Clinical LLM System

    cs.AI 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    A pre-response classifier predicts user rejection risk for clinical LLM outputs with AUROC 0.719 over 4.5 months of deployment data by incorporating deployment-specific context.

  12. The Scaling Law of Evaluation Failure: Why Simple Averaging Collapses Under Data Sparsity and Item Difficulty Gaps, and How Item Response Theory Recovers Ground Truth Across Domains

    cs.LG 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 5.0

    Simple averaging of evaluation scores degrades in rank correlation with ground truth under data sparsity and difficulty variation, while a two-parameter logistic Item Response Theory model maintains high correlation a...

  13. InfoSynth: Information-Guided Benchmark Synthesis for LLMs

    cs.CL 2026-01 conditional novelty 5.0

    Using KL divergence and entropy on embeddings, InfoSynth scores benchmark novelty/diversity and guides a genetic pipeline that generates new, code-verified Python problems from seeds.