Examining the robustness of LLM evaluation to the distributional assumptions of benchmarks
ACL, 2024

Benchmarks have emerged as the central approach for evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs). The research community often relies on a model’s average performance across the test prompts of a benchmark to evaluate the model’s performance. This is consistent with the assumption that the test prompts within a benchmark represent a random sample from some real-world distribution of interest. We note that this is generally not the case; instead, we hold that the distribution of interest varies according to the specific use case. Hence, we analyze the robustness of LLM benchmarks to their underlying distributional assumptions. We find that (1) the correlation in model performance across test prompts is non-random, (2) accounting for correlations across test prompts can change model rankings on major benchmarks, (3) explanatory factors for these correlations include semantic similarity and common LLM failure points.

Included in review: No