arXiv Machine Learning

Statistical Uncertainty Quantification for Aggregate Performance Metrics in Machine Learning Benchmarks

The paper discusses how to quantify statistical uncertainty for aggregate performance metrics in machine learning benchmarks, focusing on methods such as bootstrapping, Bayesian hierarchical modeling, and visualizing task weightings with standard errors. It demonstrates that these techniques can uncover insights—for example, revealing that a model may dominate specific task types even if its overall performance is poor. The authors apply their approach to the Visual Task Adaptation Benchmark (VTAB) to illustrate its practical usefulness.

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 AI
Sep 21

Balance of Benchmarks: Semantic Density Reweighting for Task-Conditioned Model Comparison

The paper introduces Balance of Benchmarks (BoB), a framework that improves task-conditioned model comparison by weighting benchmark evidence based on semantic density, equating scores across varying difficulty levels, and pooling task-relevant residuals. BoB retains all eligible benchmark data while adjusting its influence, outperforming uniform averaging on the WildScores dataset with higher Spearman correlation, lower MAE, and better shortlist hit rates. The method also reduces ranking instability when benchmarks are repeated or paraphrased, and lowers retrospective regret in model selection.

By Jhen-Ke Lin, Hong-Yun Lin
arXiv Statistics ML
Sep 4

Low Rank for Rank: Uncertainty-Aware Task-Specific LLM Ranking under Sparse Pairwise Comparisons

The paper introduces a low‑rank framework for ranking large language models (LLMs) on task‑specific benchmarks using sparse pairwise comparisons. By modeling the task‑by‑model ability matrix as low rank, the method shares information across related tasks while preserving task‑specific differences, and it provides uncertainty‑aware ranking through debiased estimators and simultaneous confidence sets. Experiments on synthetic data and the Chatbot Arena benchmark demonstrate improved sample efficiency and tighter, better‑calibrated ranking certificates, especially in the sparse comparison regime typical of real LLM evaluations.

By Jiachun Li, David Simchi-Levi, Will Wei Sun
arXiv AI
Jun 26

Decision-Aligned Evaluation of Uncertainty Quantification

arXiv:2606. 26990v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Uncertainty estimates in machine learning are typically evaluated using generic metrics such as the negative log-likelihood and expected calibration error, yet good performance on such metrics does not necessarily imply high utility in downstream decisions.

By Annika Schneider, Tommy Rochussen, Joshua Stiller, Vincent Fortuin