Paper · arXiv 2601.03986
Benchmark^2: Systematic Evaluation of LLM Benchmarks
Qi Qian, Chengsong Huang, Jingwen Xu, Changze Lv, Muling Wu, Wenhao Liu, Xiaohua Wang, Zhenghua Wang, Zisu Huang, Muzhao Tian, Jianhan Xu, Kun Hu, He-Da Wang, Yao Hu, Xuanjing Huang, Xiaoqing Zheng
Researchers developed Benchmark^2, a framework with three metrics to evaluate benchmark quality for large language models, revealing significant variations in existing benchmarks and enabling more efficient evaluation through selective benchmark construction.
Abstract
The rapid proliferation of benchmarks for evaluating large language models (LLMs) has created an urgent need for systematic methods to assess benchmark quality itself. We propose Benchmark^2, a comprehensive framework comprising three complementary metrics: (1) Cross-Benchmark Ranking Consistency, measuring whether a benchmark produces model rankings aligned with peer benchmarks; (2) Discriminability Score, quantifying a benchmark's ability to differentiate between models; and (3) Capability Alignment Deviation, identifying problematic instances where stronger models fail but weaker models succeed within the same model family. We conduct extensive experiments across 15 benchmarks spanning mathematics, reasoning, and knowledge domains, evaluating 11 LLMs across four model families. Our analysis reveals significant quality variations among existing benchmarks and demonstrates that selective benchmark construction based on our metrics can achieve comparable evaluation performance with substantially reduced test sets.