Poster
Unearthing Skill-level Insights for Understanding Trade-offs of Foundation Models
Mazda Moayeri · Vidhisha Balachandran · Varun Chandrasekaran · Safoora Yousefi · Thomas Fel · Soheil Feizi · Besmira Nushi · Neel Joshi · Vibhav Vineet
Hall 3 + Hall 2B #623
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Abstract
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Fri 25 Apr midnight PDT
— 2:30 a.m. PDT
Abstract:
With models getting stronger, evaluations have grown more complex, testing multiple skills in one benchmark and even in the same instance at once. However, skill-wise performance is obscured when inspecting aggregate accuracy, under-utilizing the rich signal modern benchmarks contain. We propose an automatic approach to recover the underlying skills relevant for any evaluation instance, by way of inspecting model-generated {\em rationales}. After validating the relevance of rationale-parsed skills and inferring skills for 4646k instances over 1212 benchmarks, we observe many skills to be common across benchmarks, resulting in the curation of hundreds of \emph{skill-slices} (i.e. sets of instances testing a common skill). Inspecting accuracy over these slices yields novel insights on model trade-offs: e.g., compared to GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, on average, Gemini 1.5 Pro is 18%18% more accurate in \emph{computing molar mass}, but 1919 less accurate in \emph{applying constitutional law}, despite the overall accuracies of the three models differing by a mere 0.40.4. Furthermore, we demonstrate the practical utility of our approach by showing that insights derived from skill slice analysis can generalize to held-out instances: when routing each instance to the model strongest on the relevant skills, we see a 33 accuracy improvement over our 1212 dataset corpus. Our skill-slices and framework open a new avenue in model evaluation, leveraging skill-specific analyses to unlock a more granular and actionable understanding of model capabilities.
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