Benchmarks Are Not Monolithic: Sample-Level Auditing and Orchestration for LLM Evaluation

📅 2026-07-30
📈 Citations: 0
Influential: 0
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🤖 AI Summary
This work addresses a critical limitation in conventional large language model (LLM) evaluation, which treats benchmark datasets as homogeneous aggregates and overlooks the heterogeneity among samples in cognitive, linguistic, and task-related attributes. The authors propose a dataset-centric meta-evaluation framework that introduces fine-grained, sample-level annotations across five dimensions: cognitive demand, language quality, task characteristics, contextual dependency, and ethical safety. For the first time, this approach enables multidimensional auditing of widely used benchmarks such as MMLU and ARC. By allowing dynamic subset composition aligned with specific evaluation objectives, the framework uncovers the diversity obscured by aggregate accuracy metrics and establishes a composable evaluation paradigm tailored to targeted capabilities—such as reasoning depth or ethical sensitivity—thereby substantially enhancing the precision and interpretability of LLM assessments.
📝 Abstract
Benchmark datasets are central to evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs), yet they are typically conceived as monolithic tasks, obscuring substantial variation in the demands of individual samples. We introduce a dataset-centric meta-evaluation framework that audits benchmark datasets at the sample level along five latent dimensions: 1. Cognitive and Knowledge Demands, 2. Language and Content Quality, 3. Task Properties, 4. Context, and 5. Ethics, Safety, and Fairness. Applying this framework, we annotate five influential benchmarks -- MMLU, ARC, WinoGrande, HellaSwag, and TruthfulQA -- revealing pronounced internal heterogeneity that is not captured by aggregate accuracy scores. We show how these annotations enable criterion-driven orchestration of composite benchmark subsets across datasets, supporting targeted evaluation of model capabilities such as Reasoning Depth or Ethical Sensitivity. This approach reframes benchmark evaluation as dataset introspection, providing a principled methodology for analyzing and re-composing existing benchmarks to better reflect diverse evaluation needs.
Problem

Research questions and friction points this paper is trying to address.

benchmark heterogeneity
sample-level evaluation
LLM evaluation
dataset introspection
evaluation bias
Innovation

Methods, ideas, or system contributions that make the work stand out.

sample-level auditing
meta-evaluation framework
benchmark heterogeneity
criterion-driven orchestration
dataset introspection
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