arXiv AI

Can LLMs Catch a Rigged Backtest? A Clean-Control Calibration Benchmark

The paper introduces a 96‑item paired benchmark for evaluating large language models (LLMs) on backtest auditing, where each flawed backtest is matched with a clean control that keeps strategy, dates, code style, labels, and reporting scaffold constant while altering a single methodological detail. A deterministic scorer distinguishes flaw recall, clean‑control false positives, evidence localization, and fix relevance. Experiments on 1440 cached audits from four text endpoints show that the DeepSeek auditor achieves perfect closed and clean‑aware code recall, yet open prompts over‑flag 93.8% of clean controls, and clean‑aware specificity is 87.5% even when recall saturates. Introducing a clean‑aware warning eliminates 20.8% false positives to 0% without affecting recall, though the budget anchor still flags many clean controls. Reporting clean‑control rates provides a clearer differentiation among models than reporting recall alone.

arXiv AI
Sep 18

Correct Now, Insufficient Later: Auditing Update Sufficiency in Context Compression

The paper investigates how memory systems can answer a current query correctly yet fail to retain distinctions needed for later updates. Using a paired‑history audit, the authors evaluate 24 history pairs across six synthetic mechanisms and two model backends, achieving perfect reveal accuracy on DeepSeek and high accuracy on GLM. Record‑level audits reveal specific failures in structured reveal memories and frontier late‑reference adequacy, and the authors test a label‑equivariant repair that only partially restores correctness.

By Guangzhe Zhang
arXiv AI
Sep 25

TWIST: A Proposed Benchmark for Intervention Quality in Conversational Memory, with a Human-Validated Draft-Alignment

TWIST is a new benchmark suite designed to evaluate the quality of interventions in conversational memory systems, focusing on how well these systems act correctly at belief change points. It includes four tracks—tension detection, draft vetting, belief-consistent answering, and sensitive recall governance—each paired with hard-negative controls to prevent gaming. The benchmark is rigorously validated through double annotation, adjudication, and a separability audit, revealing that current models face trade-offs between contradiction recall and false-positive rates.

By Subrat Panda
arXiv AI
Aug 26

More Rejective, Not More Discriminative: The Unit of Verification in Pre-Execution LLM Oversight

The paper introduces the twin‑prefix framework to evaluate how the size of the verification unit—i.e., how many actions a pre‑execution LLM monitor reviews in one call—affects its performance. By pairing each gold plan with a twin that differs by a single write and injecting a controlled error, the authors isolate the impact of review length on catch rates and false rejections. Their findings show that longer review windows increase rejection rates but do not improve discrimination, with the highest informedness occurring at one or two actions across all judges and domains.

By Yuchen Han, Cheng Yan, Wuyang Zhang
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Can LLMs Truly Forget? Revealing Unlearning Gaps Through Adversarial Evaluation

arXiv:2608.21606v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Machine unlearning aims to remove the influence of targeted training data from a model while preserving its remaining capabilities, but evaluating whet...

By Ayush Gupta, Hima Varshini Surisetty, Sreevidya Bollineni, Varad Ingale, Tuhina Tripathi, Abhishek Lalwani, Somya Chatterjee, Sadid Hasan
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 22

CleanScore: Black-Box Benchmark Audits with Negative Controls and Sensitivity Bounds

CleanScore is a black‑box audit framework that uses only scored outputs to assess whether models have been exposed to benchmark questions. It creates a public form and two fresh, independently written forms for each question, reports an interval for the public‑form advantage, and employs a private negative‑control bank with a transport radius to separate exposure from normal form mismatch. In a registered audit of five open models on 200 GSM8K and 200 ARC‑Challenge items, CleanScore found no exposure‑consistent advantage, bounding surface‑form inflation below five points, while also demonstrating how leaked items can inflate accuracy on unseen paraphrases and how planted advantages can be partially detected even after rewriting. whyItMatters":"The study shows that CleanScore can detect and quantify exposure effects in benchmark models, providing a more nuanced understanding of model performance beyond simple accuracy scores."

By Jeffery Opoku, David Banahene
arXiv AI
Sep 4

Clean Engineering, Unstable Measurement: A Preregistered Reliability Failure of Black-Box LLM Observers on Shared Endpoints

The paper reports a preregistered audit of language‑model judges used as measurement instruments, revealing that the assumption that a model’s responses remain stable over time is invalid. Across nearly 53,000 audited requests, repeat rankings and byte‑identical replays fell far below required reliability thresholds, with three identified mechanisms—label‑to‑meaning bias, candidate gaps below the noise floor, and input permutation noise—explaining the discrepancy. The study proposes a three‑level snapshot‑identity framework, eight design rules, and a reporting checklist to prevent such reliability failures in future evaluations.

By Haoyaun Zhu, Jie Zhang