arXiv AI

Laplace-PSN-IRT: Uncertainty Quantification for Neural Item Response Theory Models of LLM Benchmarks

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 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 9

Item Response Scaling Laws: A Measurement Theory Approach for Efficient and Generalizable Neural Scaling Estimation

arXiv:2606. 07616v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Scaling laws provide a fundamental framework for understanding the performance of Language Models (LMs), yet deriving them requires prohibitively expensive evaluations across thousands of checkpoints or millions of inference samples.

By Sang Truong, Yuheng Tu, Rylan Schaeffer, Sanmi Koyejo
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 17

LLMs Struggle to Measure What Distinguishes Students of Different Proficiency Levels: A Study of Item Discrimination in Reading Comprehension Assessment

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 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
6d ago

Efficient Safety Benchmarking via Item Response Theory

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.

By Fabio Spagliardi, M\'irian Silva, Ayan Datta, Aiden Zhou, Vamshi Bonagiri, Diogo Cruz