Benchmark of Benchmarks: Unpacking Influence and Code Repository Quality in LLM Safety Benchmarks

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Chu, Junjie, Shen, Xinyue, Leng, Ye, Backes, Michael, Shen, Yun, Zhang, Yang
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2026
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author Chu, Junjie
Shen, Xinyue
Leng, Ye
Backes, Michael
Shen, Yun
Zhang, Yang
author_facet Chu, Junjie
Shen, Xinyue
Leng, Ye
Backes, Michael
Shen, Yun
Zhang, Yang
contents The rapid expansion of research in LLM safety presents challenges in tracking advancements, making benchmarks important evaluation infrastructures for identifying key trends and facilitating systematic comparisons. Yet no systematic assessment exists of their code quality and runnability, nor of what factors are associated with the community's adoption of certain benchmarks over others. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic measurement study of 31 LLM safety benchmarks (covering prompt injection, jailbreak, and hallucination) with 382 non-benchmark papers as a control group, combining automated static analysis, human runnability testing (220+ person-hours), and bibliometric analysis. We find that only 39\% of benchmark repositories can run without modification, only 16\% provide flawless installation guides, and a mere 6\% include ethical considerations despite containing potentially harmful content. These deficiencies persist across the study period with no significant improvement. Analyzing adoption factors, we find that benchmark adoption correlates with author prominence and code runnability, but not with code quality standards such as Pylint score and maintainability, suggesting that the community's benchmark selection does not reward higher coding standards. Based on these results, we identify potential safety and reliability concerns. Some safety benchmark repositories openly expose harmful content, such as successful jailbreak responses, without any ethical warning or access control, effectively serving as unguarded attack resources. Furthermore, when benchmarks require ad-hoc modifications to run, downstream safety evaluations across different papers may not be comparable. We present case studies illustrating these concrete consequences and propose a targeted checklist to help benchmark contributors improve code quality, documentation, and ethical practices.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_04459
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Benchmark of Benchmarks: Unpacking Influence and Code Repository Quality in LLM Safety Benchmarks
Chu, Junjie
Shen, Xinyue
Leng, Ye
Backes, Michael
Shen, Yun
Zhang, Yang
Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Software Engineering
The rapid expansion of research in LLM safety presents challenges in tracking advancements, making benchmarks important evaluation infrastructures for identifying key trends and facilitating systematic comparisons. Yet no systematic assessment exists of their code quality and runnability, nor of what factors are associated with the community's adoption of certain benchmarks over others. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic measurement study of 31 LLM safety benchmarks (covering prompt injection, jailbreak, and hallucination) with 382 non-benchmark papers as a control group, combining automated static analysis, human runnability testing (220+ person-hours), and bibliometric analysis. We find that only 39\% of benchmark repositories can run without modification, only 16\% provide flawless installation guides, and a mere 6\% include ethical considerations despite containing potentially harmful content. These deficiencies persist across the study period with no significant improvement. Analyzing adoption factors, we find that benchmark adoption correlates with author prominence and code runnability, but not with code quality standards such as Pylint score and maintainability, suggesting that the community's benchmark selection does not reward higher coding standards. Based on these results, we identify potential safety and reliability concerns. Some safety benchmark repositories openly expose harmful content, such as successful jailbreak responses, without any ethical warning or access control, effectively serving as unguarded attack resources. Furthermore, when benchmarks require ad-hoc modifications to run, downstream safety evaluations across different papers may not be comparable. We present case studies illustrating these concrete consequences and propose a targeted checklist to help benchmark contributors improve code quality, documentation, and ethical practices.
title Benchmark of Benchmarks: Unpacking Influence and Code Repository Quality in LLM Safety Benchmarks
topic Cryptography and Security
Artificial Intelligence
Software Engineering
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.04459