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Benchmark overview

Research cut-off date: 2026-07-22. Status: Phase 2, not yet written. This file states the scope of the work, the arguments it owns, and the research required to complete it. It contains no findings, because none have been sourced. See the changelog for phase status.

Scope

Introduces the benchmark taxonomy used across this repository and documents the cross-cutting evaluation efforts that are not tied to a single construct: the holistic evaluation frameworks, their domain-specific extensions, and the preference-based arenas and judge benchmarks. Explains why arenas are documented here as a distinct construct rather than alongside accuracy benchmarks.

Benchmarks documented in this file

Each benchmark below is documented under the nine required headings listed in the next section. A benchmark is documented only after its construction methodology has been located and recorded in data/sources.csv.

  • HELM
  • MedHELM
  • Chatbot Arena
  • MT-Bench

Required structure for each benchmark

Every benchmark answers all nine questions, in this order. The ninth is a judgement and is argued rather than asserted.

  1. What it measures
  2. Task format
  3. Scoring method
  4. Known limitations
  5. Contamination risk
  6. Tool permissions
  7. Sampling policy
  8. Human baseline comparability
  9. Suitability for procurement

Research checklist

  • Locate and register the construction paper or methodology page for every benchmark listed above, before any result from it is recorded.
  • Answer all nine required questions for each benchmark, citing the construction source for the first three.
  • Establish, with a source, how each holistic framework selects scenarios and metrics, since that selection is the framework's principal claim.
  • Record the voting population and prompt distribution for each arena, or record that they are not disclosed.
  • State explicitly that an arena rank is not an accuracy measurement.
  • Record every extracted result in data/benchmarks.csv with harness, sampling policy, tool permissions, evidence grade, and date.
  • Run python scripts/validate_tables.py --check-ranges --check-comparability.

Completion criteria

This file is complete when every listed benchmark answers all nine questions from a registered source, when no result appears here that is absent from data/benchmarks.csv, and when the quality-control checklist in the research methodology passes.