← All IntelClip / EducationBlueprint for building a trustworthy benchmark
From Benchmaxxing: The Gap Between Benchmark Scores and Reality · ≈13:10
“And I used to think that saturation was just them saying again we don't think training on this further is going to increase real world value.”
“LLMs don't have good taste in writing.”
“But again, our goal is to maximize quality, not to minimize costs.”
“You need verifiers that are fully aligned with the prompts.”
What’s in it
- Explains why AI benchmarks get 'saturated' at 80% due to hidden broken tasks
- Lays out a checklist for building rigorous, non-gameable AI benchmarks
- Introduces Hemingway Bench, a human-judged benchmark for writing quality
Clip transcript
So how are we going to end benchmaxing? We need to hold the benchmark industry and the labs to a higher standard. The first thing we need to do when making a good benchmark is start with great human experts. And those experts inform everything that is downstream from what types of tasks are we going to have the agent do? How is success measured? What are the input files that agents are given? What are the tools that they're given? But we also do need that product sense. So imagine you're making a medical benchmark. It's not enough to have doctors who can answer specific medical questions because if you're trying to test how ready are we for agents to be deployed into hospitals. You also need someone with the business sense to know what's the regulatory environment, what's the legal requirements because that is going to impact what types of tasks you're trying to have the AI solve. You need high fidelity input data which is best done by going out and getting it from the real world, having actual people create this data. Synthetic approaches are possible, but it is very very hard to do it reliably. The tools need to actually work. A lot of benchmarks have tools that are buggy in various ways. And unless you're intentionally making a benchmark about buggy tools, this just introduces noise. You need verifiers that are fully aligned with the prompts. And this is a two-way alignment. So the verifiers need to be verifying everything the prompt asks for. And everything the prompt asks for needs to be covered by the verifiers. And if you get either side of those two misaligned, then it's going to be unfair to models and you're introducing random noise. You need to thoroughly QC everything and you need to have a private hold out set so you don't get contaminated. And if you do all this right, then you'll avoid what often happens with benchmarks, which is when labs get to like 80% and say, "Okay, this is saturated." And I used to think that saturation was just them saying again we don't think training on this further is going to increase real world value. And it often does mean that but it can mean that because the lab is saying we realize 20% of these tasks are broken. But the problem is that as you're hill climbing you don't know what 20% are broken until you solve all the others. And so as a result you have a lot of noise. And if that 20% of broken tasks is randomly but in a biased way assigning the rewards, it's going to really distort the model relative ranking you're trying to get. So at Serge, we created a benchmark called Hemingway bench to measure writing. There have been a number of writing benchmarks that use various mechanical means to try to assess writing quality, but we believe that writing is just too rich and deep and nuanced and frankly human of an activity to measure with mechanical benchmarks and LM as a judge doesn't really work either because LLMs don't have good taste in writing. Again, this is sort of the you can't expand the frontier from within the frontier situation. So what we've done is we've just created a workforce of thousands of professional writers in various domains, technical writers, poets, journalists, editors, and we just have them do blind model comparisons and then we create this leaderboard and it is quite expensive, right? Human eval is very expensive. Getting the time of these professionals is quite expensive. But again, our goal is to maximize quality, not to minimize costs.
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