arXiv AI

Prediction-Powered Smoothing and Validation for Disaggregated AI Evaluation

The paper introduces prediction‑powered smoothing (PP‑S) and its taxonomy‑aware extension (PP‑TS) to improve point and interval estimates of domain‑specific AI performance when only a limited sample of labeled units is available. It also proposes a new design‑based cross‑validation score that is approximately unbiased for selecting between direct and smoothed estimators. Experiments on a curated benchmark and real‑world agent traffic show that the proposed methods outperform direct estimators in both accuracy and coverage, and that the new score matches the performance of an independent validation sample while providing more precise error estimates.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 21

BACON: Budgeted Human Calibration for Modeling and Evaluation with Multiple AI Judges

arXiv:2607. 16239v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: AI judges offer a scalable, low-cost alternative to human evaluation, but their outputs can be biased relative to human preferences and highly item-dependent, varying across judges, tasks, and domains.

By Lei Shi, Anlan Zhang, Rita Lyu, Zhengmian Hu, Tong Yu, David Arbour, Avi Feller, Saayan Mitra, Ritwik Sinha
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

Which Metrics Save the Most Human Annotation? Prediction-Powered Evaluation and Meta-Evaluation

The paper introduces prediction‑powered evaluation, a framework that blends limited human judgments with large‑scale automatic scores to produce unbiased, data‑efficient system comparisons. It offers both parametric and non‑parametric methods, examines the trade‑off between paired and unpaired designs, and validates the approach on six WMT datasets. Additionally, the authors propose the Prediction‑Powered Saving Ratio (PPSR), a meta‑metric that quantifies how much human annotation can be saved by using an automatic metric within this framework, providing more discriminative and stable metric rankings than existing system‑level meta‑metrics.

By Mingqi Gao, Anthony Sicilia, Weiyan Shi
arXiv AI
Jul 3

PACE: A Proxy for Agentic Capability Evaluation

arXiv:2607. 02032v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Evaluating LLM agents on benchmarks like SWE-Bench and GAIA can be expensive, time-consuming, and requires complex infrastructure.

By Yueqi Song, Lintang Sutawika, Jiarui Liu, Lindia Tjuatja, Jiayi Geng, Yunze Xiao, Daniel Lee, Aditya Bharat Soni, Vincent Lo, Xiang Yue, Graham Neubig
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Fine-Tune, Then Rectify

The paper proposes a two‑stage framework that first fine‑tunes a large language model (LLM) and then rectifies its outputs, allocating limited labeled data optimally between the stages. It argues that the usual mean‑squared‑error objective for fine‑tuning misaligns with the downstream rectification, and instead suggests minimizing prediction‑error variance for mean estimation or a scalarized variance metric for general M‑estimation. Empirical results confirm that this variance‑based fine‑tuning, combined with optimal data allocation, yields significant efficiency gains over using either fine‑tuning or rectification alone, or using the conventional objective.

By Zikun Ye, Jinglong Zhao, Lei Wang
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 10

Prediction-Powered Active Testing

arXiv:2607. 08347v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Active testing provides a label--efficient approach to risk estimation by adaptively selecting which test points should be labelled.

By Kianoosh Ashouritaklimi, Valentin Kilian, Daolang Huang, Tom Rainforth, Fran\c{c}ois Caron
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 23

From Offline Proxies to Online Decisions: A Layered Engagement Evaluation Framework for Conversational AI

The paper presents a layered framework for evaluating conversational AI by aligning offline proxy signals with online A/B experiment outcomes. It introduces a three‑step alignment chain—behavioral label to product outcome, classifier to candidate behavior, and offline signal to experiment effect—alongside an audit protocol that compares confidence intervals and rankings. In a real‑world deployment, the composite proxy achieved 81.1% F1 versus 34.3% for the raw classifier, correctly predicting direction on all 113 contrasts and enabling efficient prioritization of candidate models before costly online testing.

By Xuanyi Li, Vaskar Nath, Hossein Amirkhani, Jay Li, Alex Deng