CreditAudit: 2$^\text{nd}$ Dimension for LLM Evaluation and Selection

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Song, Yiliang, An, Hongjun, Xiao, Jiangong, Zhao, Haofei, Shao, Jiawei, Li, Xuelong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
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author Song, Yiliang
An, Hongjun
Xiao, Jiangong
Zhao, Haofei
Shao, Jiawei
Li, Xuelong
author_facet Song, Yiliang
An, Hongjun
Xiao, Jiangong
Zhao, Haofei
Shao, Jiawei
Li, Xuelong
contents Leaderboard scores on public benchmarks have been steadily rising and converging, with many frontier language models now separated by only marginal differences. However, these scores often fail to match users' day to day experience, because system prompts, output protocols, and interaction modes evolve under routine iteration, and in agentic multi step pipelines small protocol shifts can trigger disproportionate failures, leaving practitioners uncertain about which model to deploy. We propose CreditAudit, a deployment oriented credit audit framework that evaluates models under a family of semantically aligned and non adversarial system prompt templates across multiple benchmarks, reporting mean ability as average performance across scenarios and scenario induced fluctuation sigma as a stability risk signal, and further mapping volatility into interpretable credit grades from AAA to BBB via cross model quantiles with diagnostics that mitigate template difficulty drift. Controlled experiments on GPQA, TruthfulQA, and MMLU Pro show that models with similar mean ability can exhibit substantially different fluctuation, and stability risk can overturn prioritization decisions in agentic or high failure cost regimes. By providing a 2D and grade based language for regime specific selection, CreditAudit supports tiered deployment and more disciplined allocation of testing and monitoring effort, enabling more objective and trustworthy model evaluation for real world use.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2602_02515
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle CreditAudit: 2$^\text{nd}$ Dimension for LLM Evaluation and Selection
Song, Yiliang
An, Hongjun
Xiao, Jiangong
Zhao, Haofei
Shao, Jiawei
Li, Xuelong
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
Leaderboard scores on public benchmarks have been steadily rising and converging, with many frontier language models now separated by only marginal differences. However, these scores often fail to match users' day to day experience, because system prompts, output protocols, and interaction modes evolve under routine iteration, and in agentic multi step pipelines small protocol shifts can trigger disproportionate failures, leaving practitioners uncertain about which model to deploy. We propose CreditAudit, a deployment oriented credit audit framework that evaluates models under a family of semantically aligned and non adversarial system prompt templates across multiple benchmarks, reporting mean ability as average performance across scenarios and scenario induced fluctuation sigma as a stability risk signal, and further mapping volatility into interpretable credit grades from AAA to BBB via cross model quantiles with diagnostics that mitigate template difficulty drift. Controlled experiments on GPQA, TruthfulQA, and MMLU Pro show that models with similar mean ability can exhibit substantially different fluctuation, and stability risk can overturn prioritization decisions in agentic or high failure cost regimes. By providing a 2D and grade based language for regime specific selection, CreditAudit supports tiered deployment and more disciplined allocation of testing and monitoring effort, enabling more objective and trustworthy model evaluation for real world use.
title CreditAudit: 2$^\text{nd}$ Dimension for LLM Evaluation and Selection
topic Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02515