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:2607. 28634v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The estimation of item difficulty plays a key role in both formative assessment and large-scale high-stakes summative assessments.
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: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:2608. 06609v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Automated item evaluation (AIE) refers to the use of computational methods to assess item quality without requiring manual expert review or field testing of the items under evaluation.
arXiv:2608. 05086v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models differ in how safely they behave and these differences are measured by safety benchmarks.
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.
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:2609.09372v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Although MMLU is widely adopted as a benchmark for calibrating general AI capabilities, we psychometrically demonstrate that its aggregate score prim...
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.
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.
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.
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.