The paper demonstrates that Item Response Theory (IRT) can uncover meaningful structure in safety benchmarks for language models, allowing adaptive item selection to approximate full benchmark rankings with Spearman’s ρ > 0.90 while cutting evaluation costs by at least 80% and up to 99.9% on some suites. It also proposes a static method to extract a small, informative subset of items that can be reused across models, achieving 80–99.8% cost savings. These findings show that psychometric techniques can make safety evaluation more efficient without sacrificing ranking accuracy.
By Fabio Spagliardi, M\'irian Silva, Ayan Datta, Aiden Zhou, Vamshi Bonagiri, Diogo Cruz
arXiv:2605. 28591v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The validity of AI safety evaluations depends on models behaving consistently across controlled and deployment settings.
By Katharina Deckenbach, Haritz Puerto, Jonas Geiping, Sahar Abdelnabi
arXiv:2607. 15190v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI benchmarks increasingly leverage item-level statistical models, particularly item response theory (IRT), to estimate model capabilities, rank systems, select informative examples, and diagnose benchmark quality.
By Han Jiang, Sunbeom Kwon, Jinwen Luo, Ziang Xiao, Susu Zhang
The paper investigates whether existing AI safety benchmarks, designed for large language models, are suitable for evaluating small language models (SLMs). By testing five benchmark suites on 26 open‑source SLMs with a unified scoring rubric, the authors find that ambiguous judgments dominate, especially for complex prompts and certain architectures. This ambiguity, linked to factors like lexical density and output perplexity, undermines the reliability of aggregate leaderboards and reveals a confound between model capability and perceived safety.
By Nyamtulla Shaik, Fengjun Li, Bo Luo
arXiv:2608. 06202v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language model (LLM) benchmark evaluations are routinely used to support claims about model safety, reliability, and deployment readiness.
By Ro Encarnaci\'on, Tina Behzad, Emma Lurie, Dana\'e Metaxa
arXiv:2605. 17173v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models exhibit safety degradation in non-English languages.
By Max Zhang, Ameen Patel, Sang T. Truong, Sanmi Koyejo
arXiv:2605. 23055v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Frontier language models sometimes recognize that they are being evaluated and adjust their behavior, undermining validity of benchmark results.
By Changling Li, Terry Jingchen Zhang, Jie Zhang, Zhijing Jin, Sahar Abdelnabi, Maksym Andriushchenko
arXiv:2501. 14940v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values is essential for their safe deployment and widespread adoption.
By Guangzhi Sun, Xiao Zhan, Shutong Feng, Philip C. Woodland, Jose Such
Safety-Flag is a unified benchmark that consolidates seven popular safety datasets into a single balanced flag/do‑not‑flag protocol, providing item‑level decisions and confidence scores for multiple large language models and dedicated guards. The benchmark evaluates moderator reliability across three dimensions—error direction, probability calibration, and confidence‑based error ranking—revealing that aggregate accuracy masks significant differences, such as one model flagging 85% of benign content while another misses 54% of harmful content. The study shows that general‑purpose models are overconfident, but temperature tuning can substantially improve calibration, and confidence‑based abstention can reduce selective risk, though performance varies with how well confidence ranks errors.
By Yibo Hu
arXiv:2606. 30256v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Safety benchmarks often buy scalability by fixing the prompt, the language, and the turn structure.
By Camilo Chac\'on Sartori
arXiv:2508. 00923v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to answer health-related questions and support healthcare workflows, yet evidence for their safety still relies heavily on static benchmarks that can rapidly become obsolete or be optimized against.
By Jiazhen Pan (Cherise), Bailiang Jian (Cherise), Paul Hager (Cherise), Yundi Zhang (Cherise), Che Liu (Cherise), Friederike Jungmann (Cherise), Hongwei Bran Li (Cherise), Julian Canisius (Cherise), Chenyu You (Cherise), Junde Wu (Cherise), Jiayuan Zhu (Cherise), Fenglin Liu (Cherise), Yuyuan Liu (Cherise), Niklas Bubeck (Cherise), Moritz Knolle (Cherise), Chen (Cherise), Chen (Cherise), Christian Wachinger, Zhenyu Gong, Cheng Ouyang, Georgios Kaissis, Benedikt Wiestler, Daniel Rueckert
arXiv:2606. 08044v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large Language Model (LLM) safety has often been evaluated at the behavior level, which provides limited evidence of internal robustness, as these evaluations target outputs rather than representation-level vulnerability under intervention.
By Enyi Jiang, Anders Gj{\o}lbye, Yibo Jacky Zhang, Sanmi Koyejo