arXiv Machine Learning By Jeffery Opoku, David Banahene

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

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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."

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