Hugging Face Trending Papers

Phantom Gains: Auditing Self-Improvement Against a Measured Null

Read the original on Hugging Face Trending Papers →

Whether a language model has improved itself is increasingly judged not by mean accuracy but by which individual problems it gains and loses. Tracking these transitions means differencing two noisy estimates, leaving them vulnerable to measurement artifacts.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at Hugging Face Trending Papers.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

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

The paper investigates the reliability of language‑model judges used as measurement instruments on shared endpoints. Through two preregistered audits of 52,988 requests, the authors found that repeat rankings and byte‑identical replays fell far short of required thresholds, revealing significant instability. They identify three mechanisms—label‑to‑meaning bias, candidate gaps below the noise floor, and input permutation noise—that explain the gap, and propose a snapshot‑identity ladder, design rules, and a reporting checklist to mitigate such failures.