Certifying Compressed Language Models: An Audit and a Statistical Toolkit
arXiv:2608. 15046v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A fraction of a point of benchmark accuracy is the usual evidence that a compressed model is equivalent to its original.
arXiv:2606. 23767v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Headline accuracies on the Tuebingen cause-effect pairs are routinely compared across papers even though each is measured under its authors' own protocol -- different pair subsets, weightings, model-selection, and decision rates.
arXiv:2608. 15046v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: A fraction of a point of benchmark accuracy is the usual evidence that a compressed model is equivalent to its original.
The study analyzes 373,019 judgments from LLM‑scored benchmarks, decomposing variance into system, item, judge, and interaction components via generalizability theory. It finds that with a single judge, generalizability converges to a ceiling determined by the system‑by‑judge variance, which is substantially lower in pairwise preference settings, allowing one judge to suffice. The research also reveals significant biases in presentation order and highlights that many published win‑rate claims fall below the measured floor of the benchmarks.
The paper introduces a calibrated instrument for rigorously measuring how inference optimizations—such as quantization, early‑exit, and speculative decoding—affect the output quality of large language models. It uses a formally calibrated LLM judge that verifies no systematic bias between statistically equivalent outputs and includes a null condition to ensure measured differences are zero. Applying this method, the authors find that a 4‑bit model is indistinguishable from its 16‑bit counterpart, while 3‑bit quantization and early‑exit techniques incur measurable quality losses that vary by language and task, and that token‑certainty‑based acceptance rules cannot reliably identify impactful errors.
arXiv:2609.07944v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Existing causal-inference benchmarks for LLMs mostly score method descriptions or whether generated code runs, not whether the executed workflow recove...
Large language model optimization is an active research area, spanning quantization of model weights, early-exit methods for skipping layers, and speculative decoding. Each track uses its own quality...
The paper investigates how sequential knowledge editing can degrade a language model’s ability to discern reliable evidence from unreliable evidence without affecting overall accuracy. Using a conservatively tuned LoRA on Qwen2.5‑7B‑Instruct, the authors show that after 1,000 edits the model’s arbitration score for untouched facts drops by 36%, leading to higher error rates on its most confident decisions, while MMLU accuracy remains unchanged. The study also finds that in some model‑method combinations, sequential edits can reduce MMLU to chance levels even though edit success and locality remain perfect.
arXiv:2607. 05806v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Training data for machine learning is routinely collected by a selection process the model never sees: loans are observed only when granted, outcomes only when a test was ordered.
arXiv:2609.00654v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We describe the SciTrue team's participation in both subtasks of the NTCIR-19 SciClaimEval task~\cite{sciclaimeval}, which asks systems to verify scien...
arXiv:2606. 31630v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Language models increasingly write probabilistic programs (in NumPyro, Stan, or Pyro), but a program that compiles, runs, and passes every unit test can still be \emph{statistically} wrong -- a Gaussian likelihood for heavy-tailed data, a Poisson for over-dispersed counts, an invalid prior support, or a pathological parameterization.
arXiv:2608. 00915v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Uplift modeling (conditional-average-treatment-effect estimation) drives personalized targeting, yet published uplift benchmarks frequently disagree on which estimator performs best; we show the disagreement is substantially about metrics, not models.
arXiv:2608. 06564v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Quantization is how large language models are actually deployed, and below four bits it hurts.
The study investigates whether Jev, a typed classifier that outputs probabilities over allowed answers without generating text, can replace large language model (LLM) rubric judges. Across nine panels from seven benchmarks, Jev’s accuracy differed significantly from LLM judges in only 8 of 27 paired comparisons, performing best on binary criteria and worse only on graded ones, while most other comparisons were inconclusive. In terms of cost and speed, Jev was 29 to 325 times cheaper and 30 to 220 times faster than the flash‑tier LLM judges, and a cascade approach that defers uncertain Jev verdicts to an LLM yielded only modest gains. whyItMatters":"The findings suggest that a lightweight classifier like Jev can serve as an efficient first‑stage evaluator, potentially reducing the reliance on expensive and slow LLM judges in automated grading pipelines."