SCAN: Structured Capability Assessment and Navigation for LLMs

TL;DR

SCAN offers a detailed, hierarchical framework for evaluating and understanding the fine-grained capabilities of large language models, surpassing traditional ranking methods.

Contribution

It introduces a comprehensive, fine-grained evaluation framework with novel taxonomy extraction, query synthesis, visualization tools, and an improved LLM-as-a-Judge approach.

Findings

Substantial performance variation within LLM sub-capabilities

Fine-grained evaluation reveals nuanced model behaviors

The PC^2-based approach improves judgment accuracy

Abstract

Evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) has become increasingly important, with automatic evaluation benchmarks gaining prominence as alternatives to human evaluation. While existing research has focused on approximating model rankings, such benchmarks fail to provide users and developers with a comprehensive and fine-grained understanding of a specific model's capabilities. To fill this gap, we propose \textbf{SCAN} (Structured Capability Assessment and Navigation), a practical framework that enables detailed characterization of LLM capabilities through comprehensive and fine-grained evaluation. SCAN incorporates four key components: (1) TaxBuilder, which extracts capability-indicating tags from extensive queries to construct a hierarchical taxonomy automatically; (2) RealMix, a query synthesis and filtering mechanism that ensures sufficient evaluation data for each capability tag; (3) a suite of visualization and analysis tools that facilitate efficient navigation and analysis of model capabilities; and (4) a PC$^2$-based (Pre-Comparison-derived Criteria) LLM-as-a-Judge approach that achieves significantly higher accuracy compared to classic LLM-as-a-Judge method. Using SCAN, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of 21 mainstream LLMs. Our detailed analysis of the GPT-OSS family reveals substantial performance variations, even within sub-capabilities belonging to the same category of capability. This finding highlights the importance of fine-grained evaluation in accurately understanding LLM behavior. Project homepage and resources are available at \href{https://github.com/liudan193/SCAN}{https://github.com/liudan193/SCAN}.