arXiv:2511. 04689v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Evaluating large language models (LLMs) typically requires thousands of benchmark items, making the process expensive, slow, and increasingly impractical at scale.
arXiv:2512. 07019v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The proliferation of Large Language Models (LLMs) necessitates valid evaluation methods to provide guidance for both downstream applications and actionable future improvements.
arXiv:2601. 02580v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Traditional methods for determining assessment item parameters, such as difficulty and discrimination, rely heavily on expensive field testing to collect student performance data for Item Response Theory (IRT) calibration.
arXiv:2607. 25257v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Item Response Theory (IRT) has recently been proposed as a framework for evaluating large language model (LLM) benchmarks by separating a model's latent ability from the properties of individual benchmark items.
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.
Item discrimination is a fundamental psychometric property of educational assessment, which measures whether an item meaningfully distinguishes students with higher proficiency from students with lower proficiency. While various existing works have explored whether large language models (LLMs) can estimate item difficulty, it remains unclear whether they can capture item discrimination.
arXiv:2601.13885v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Computerized Adaptive Testing (CAT) has proven effective for efficient LLM evaluation on multiple-choice benchmarks, but modern LLM evaluatio...
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.
The paper argues that traditional global calibration metrics, such as Expected Calibration Error and Brier Score, are confounded by differences in model accuracy when comparing large language models. It introduces ACE, an accuracy‑controlled evaluation framework that offers Instance‑Aligned, Distribution‑Aligned, and Candidate‑Aligned views to provide fairer cross‑model comparisons. Experiments across various benchmarks reveal that many reported calibration advantages disappear after accuracy control and that model rankings often reverse, indicating that raw global metrics are unreliable for cross‑model calibration assessment.
arXiv:2607. 29252v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Reliable evaluation of open-ended LLM outputs requires fine-grained rubrics, yet expert curation is costly and difficult to scale.
Newly developed items must ordinarily be field tested before their psychometric properties are known, creating a cold start problem for item calibration. Predicting item parameters from features is a long standing measurement problem dating back to the Linear Logistic Test Model; modern text embeddings now automate the design matrices traditionally specified by hand.
arXiv:2606. 13221v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Evaluating new large language models typically requires costly human annotation campaigns at scale.
arXiv:2608. 05086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models differ in how safely they behave and these differences are measured by safety benchmarks.