arXiv Machine Learning

One Ruler: A Same-Hands Re-Evaluation of Bivariate Causal Direction on Tuebingen, with a Parameter-Free Compression Baseline

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 AI
Sep 24

Ask Which, Not How Good: Sizing Benchmarks Scored by an LLM

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.

By Atul Anand
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 17

A Calibrated Instrument for Measuring How Inference Optimizations Affect Output Quality

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.

By Jerry Kaplan
arXiv AI
Sep 25

Sequential knowledge editing breaks a model's ability to tell good evidence from bad, without costing it accuracy

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.

By Atul Anand
arXiv Machine Learning
Jul 1

Calibration, Not Compilation: Detecting and Repairing Misspecified Probabilistic Programs Written by Language Models

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.

By Jian Xu, Delu Zeng, John Paisley, Qibin Zhao
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

JEV vs. LLMs as Rubric Judges: Cheaper, Faster, and Wrong in the Same Places

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."

By Delip Rao, Chris Callison-Burch