Do These LLM Benchmarks Agree? Fixing Benchmark Evaluation with BenchBench

TL;DR

This paper critically examines the agreement testing of language model benchmarks, identifies methodological issues, proposes best practices, and introduces BenchBench, a tool to improve benchmark validation reliability.

Contribution

It introduces standardized procedures for Benchmark Agreement Testing (BAT), a new Python package BenchBench, and a meta-benchmark leaderboard to enhance the validity of benchmark evaluations.

Findings

Methodological choices significantly affect BAT results.

Implementing best practices improves BAT robustness.

BenchBench tool facilitates standardized benchmark agreement testing.

Abstract

Recent advancements in Language Models (LMs) have catalyzed the creation of multiple benchmarks, designed to assess these models' general capabilities. A crucial task, however, is assessing the validity of the benchmarks themselves. This is most commonly done via Benchmark Agreement Testing (BAT), where new benchmarks are validated against established ones using some agreement metric (e.g., rank correlation). Despite the crucial role of BAT for benchmark builders and consumers, there are no standardized procedures for such agreement testing. This deficiency can lead to invalid conclusions, fostering mistrust in benchmarks and upending the ability to properly choose the appropriate benchmark to use. By analyzing over 40 prominent benchmarks, we demonstrate how some overlooked methodological choices can significantly influence BAT results, potentially undermining the validity of conclusions. To address these inconsistencies, we propose a set of best practices for BAT and demonstrate how utilizing these methodologies greatly improves BAT robustness and validity. To foster adoption and facilitate future research,, we introduce BenchBench, a python package for BAT, and release the BenchBench-leaderboard, a meta-benchmark designed to evaluate benchmarks using their peers. Our findings underscore the necessity for standardized BAT, ensuring the robustness and validity of benchmark evaluations in the evolving landscape of language model research. BenchBench Package: github.com/IBM/BenchBench Leaderboard: hf.co/spaces/IBM/BenchBench