Certifying Model Upgrades with Slice-Wise Non-Regression and Incumbent Fallback
Read the original on arXiv Machine Learning →The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
The Flow has not summarised this story yet — read it at arXiv Machine Learning.
UpgradeBench is a decision‑centric longitudinal benchmark that evaluates how fine‑tuned language‑model specialists should be handled when new base‑model releases occur. It covers four consecutive Qwen releases, a continuation checkpoint, six tasks, two model sizes, and OLMo checkpoints with known training lineage, and examines whether retraining, adapter transfer, or other recovery strategies improve specialist performance. The benchmark reveals that upgrade gains vary by task and release interval, that direct adapter copying is sensitive to pretraining distance, and that teacher relabeling can recover specialists without new annotations. "whyItMatters":"The study provides actionable insights into the cost‑effective management of specialist models across model releases, showing how to balance retraining effort with performance gains."
End-to-end task-success is the dominant way to evaluate LLM agents, but one aggregate number tells you that an agent regressed, not where. We present layer-isolated evaluation: a deployed ordering agent is decomposed into a fixed taxonomy of layers (ontology, intent, routing, decomposition, escalation, safety, memory, and cross-cutting envelope/defense), each exercised by its own assertion slice in a deterministic, no-LLM "pure" mode.
arXiv:2606. 11686v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: End-to-end task-success is the dominant way to evaluate LLM agents, but one aggregate number tells you that an agent regressed, not where.
arXiv:2607. 02587v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Trust-benchmark scores reported on a chat-LLM release line are often carried across several checkpoints of the same line, as if the underlying model had not shifted between releases.
The paper introduces DISCERN, a two-tier protocol for certifying that updates to production models do not increase risk. It first uses unlabeled data to detect benign updates based on disagreement rates, then selectively labels only disagreements through an anytime-valid confidence sequence. The method achieves finite-sample validity with label-complexity bounds of order ρ²/ε², demonstrating significant label savings and strong empirical performance across 14,000+ audit streams.
arXiv:2608. 20290v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Whether a language model has improved itself is increasingly judged not by mean accuracy but by which individual problems it gains and loses.