Efficient Benchmarking Is Just Feature Selection and Multiple Regression

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Bowyer, Sam, Locatelli, Acyr, Cao, Kris
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2026
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author Bowyer, Sam
Locatelli, Acyr
Cao, Kris
author_facet Bowyer, Sam
Locatelli, Acyr
Cao, Kris
contents Efficient benchmarking techniques aim to lower the computational cost of evaluating LLMs by predicting full benchmark scores using only a subset of a benchmark's questions. By reframing this problem as an instance of multiple regression with feature selection, we find that existing efficient benchmarking methods can be greatly improved by simply using kernel ridge regression at the prediction stage. Additionally, using an information-theoretic feature-selection algorithm called minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR), we can further improve upon these methods by selecting question subsets that will be maximally useful for prediction. Except in very data-poor settings, these approaches consistently achieve smaller prediction errors (in both MAE and RMSE), and greater ranking correlation between predicted and true scores (in both Spearman $ρ$ and Kendall $τ$) across a range of benchmarks using both binary and continuous metrics. Furthermore, mRMR subsampling is much faster than competitor methods (which often involve fitting probabilistic models or running clustering algorithms), and is more likely to select the same questions under different random seeds or training data splits. Tutorial code can be found at https://github.com/sambowyer/mrmr_eval .
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_25773
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient Benchmarking Is Just Feature Selection and Multiple Regression
Bowyer, Sam
Locatelli, Acyr
Cao, Kris
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
Efficient benchmarking techniques aim to lower the computational cost of evaluating LLMs by predicting full benchmark scores using only a subset of a benchmark's questions. By reframing this problem as an instance of multiple regression with feature selection, we find that existing efficient benchmarking methods can be greatly improved by simply using kernel ridge regression at the prediction stage. Additionally, using an information-theoretic feature-selection algorithm called minimum redundancy maximum relevance (mRMR), we can further improve upon these methods by selecting question subsets that will be maximally useful for prediction. Except in very data-poor settings, these approaches consistently achieve smaller prediction errors (in both MAE and RMSE), and greater ranking correlation between predicted and true scores (in both Spearman $ρ$ and Kendall $τ$) across a range of benchmarks using both binary and continuous metrics. Furthermore, mRMR subsampling is much faster than competitor methods (which often involve fitting probabilistic models or running clustering algorithms), and is more likely to select the same questions under different random seeds or training data splits. Tutorial code can be found at https://github.com/sambowyer/mrmr_eval .
title Efficient Benchmarking Is Just Feature Selection and Multiple Regression
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.25773