arXiv Machine Learning

Benchmarking on Tasks That Matter: Dataset Selection for Preserving Model Rankings

arXiv:2606. 27997v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Benchmarks of machine learning models often include many datasets, making evaluation expensive.

arXiv AI
Jul 14

Coresets Before Score Sets: Evaluation-Unsupervised Prompt Subset Selection for LLM Benchmarks

arXiv:2607. 09739v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We study LLM benchmark coreset selection: selecting a small subset of prompts over multiple benchmarks whose induced model scores and rankings approximate those obtained from the full benchmark suite.

By Jihan Yao, Gantavya Bhatt, Arnav Das, Peter Jin, Ke Bao, Qiaolin Yu, Khushi Bhardwaj, Chang Su, Jialei Wang, Yikai Zhu, Sugam Devare, Damon Mosk-Aoyama, Zhen Dong, Venkat Krishna Srinivasan, Yineng Zhang, Oleksii Kuchaiev, Jiantao Jiao, Banghua Zhu, Jeff Bilmes
arXiv Computation and Language
6d ago

Large Language Model Selection with Limited Annotations

arXiv:2605.24981v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Choosing a Large Language Model (LLM) for a given task requires comparing many strong candidates, yet standard evaluation relies on costly annotati...

By Yavuz Durmazkeser, Patrik Okanovic, Andreas Kirsch, Torsten Hoefler, Nezihe Merve G\"urel
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 Machine Learning
Aug 20

Lost in Aggregation: How Benchmarks Overlook Irreplaceable Model Strengths

The paper argues that typical tabular machine learning benchmarks, which aggregate results by averaging scores or ranks, can hide which models are essential for achieving the best performance on specific datasets. It proposes evaluating models against a data‑centric peak performance frontier, classifying them as irreplaceable, sufficient, redundant, or fallible based on their position relative to other models. Applying this to the TabArena benchmark shows that common aggregation metrics mainly capture consistency and failure avoidance, but fail to reflect dataset‑specific strengths, leading to a misalignment between aggregate rewards and true model utility.

By Andrej Tschalzev, Stefan L\"udtke, Heiner Stuckenschmidt, Christian Bartelt
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 8

Bradley-Terry Rankings for Recommender Systems Across Dataset Taxonomies

arXiv:2606. 07492v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The ranking of recommendation algorithms is a challenging problem since model performance is sensitive to dataset characteristics such as sparsity, sequential structure, and scale.

By Ekaterina Grishina, Stepan Kuznetsov, Askar Tsyganov, Ilya Ivanov, Daria Korovaitceva, Margarita Rusanova, Uliana Parkina, Alexander Derevyagin, Evgeny Frolov, Sergey Samsonov, Anton Lysenko
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 28

The Score Granularity Gap in Black-Box LLM Classification: A Comparative Study of Confidence Constructions

The paper investigates the "score granularity gap" in black-box large language model (LLM) classifiers, asking how finely a confidence score can be thresholded for deployment. By comparing seven confidence construction methods across 25 model-dataset pairs, the authors find that single-shot verbalized confidence, when properly converted to a probability, ranks well but offers only a few distinct threshold values, limiting operational flexibility. The study also shows that multi-query aggregation can improve weak models but may harm strong ones, and provides concrete guidance for deployment trade-offs.

By Ao Sun, Tian Sun, Jiaxing Geng