arXiv Machine Learning

MA-Bench: Measuring Operational Planning in Language Models

arXiv AI
Aug 19

Grading Needs a Rubric, Not Intelligence

Small language models can grade open‑ended exam answers as reliably as much larger models when they use an explicit rubric. In experiments with six cost‑efficient model configurations, the rubric decouples grading from judge intelligence, with answer identity explaining 95.6% of score variance and judge identity only 0.2%. Removing rubric criteria or the official answer collapses reliability and inflates scores, showing the rubric’s essential role.

By Jhen-Ke Lin
arXiv AI
Oct 26

RubricCraft: Where Solutions Diverge, Criteria Emerge

RubricCraft is a method that generates natural‑language evaluation rubrics for open‑ended, artifact‑producing language tasks by analyzing differences among independently sampled solver trajectories. It constructs rubric criteria based on how each attempt satisfies or violates task requirements, then applies and refines these criteria to better detect errors and recognize partial correctness without needing a single reference solution. On the SpreadsheetBench v2 benchmark, RubricCraft’s rubrics reduce the proportion of incorrect outputs that pass (29.5% vs. 42.6%) and improve ranking of outputs while maintaining consistency with the benchmark’s own checker.

By Hosein Hasanbeig, Priyanshu Gupta, Ashish Tiwari, Vu Le, Sumit Gulwani
arXiv AI
Aug 25

GIM: Evaluating models via tasks that integrate multiple cognitive domains

The paper introduces the Grounded Integration Measure (GIM), a benchmark of 820 expert‑authored problems designed to test models on tasks that integrate multiple cognitive operations such as constraint satisfaction, state tracking, epistemic vigilance, and audience calibration. GIM emphasizes realistic, broadly accessible knowledge rather than specialized expertise, and uses a judge‑aware 2‑parameter logistic IRT model to produce robust ability estimates across 53 model‑thinking‑level configurations. The authors provide a comprehensive leaderboard of 22 models and 47 test configurations, and conduct an extensive study on how test‑time compute affects model capability, finding that configuration choices like thinking budget and quantization can be as influential as model selection itself. whyItMatters":"By focusing on integration of multiple cognitive domains, GIM offers a more realistic assessment of model reasoning capabilities than benchmarks that either overemphasize memorization or abstract reasoning alone."

By Rohit Patel, Alexandre Rezende, Steven McClain
arXiv Machine Learning
Oct 19

Sample, Mix, or Verify? Allocating Test-Time Compute under Imperfect Verifiers

The paper introduces SPLIT, a method that optimally allocates test‑time compute among sampling, model selection, and verification for language models and agents. Using an exact probability formula that accounts for task difficulty, shared blind spots, and verifier correlations, SPLIT is fitted via empirical Bayes on a small labeled pilot and then used to plan budgets for unseen tasks. Across seven diverse benchmarks, 26 models, and six verifier types, SPLIT achieves near‑optimal performance, outperforming rule‑based baselines by up to 2.5 percentage points and providing insights into when additional LLM judges reduce precision.

By Srinivasan Iyengar