English

BenchBrowser: Retrieving Evidence for Evaluating Benchmark Validity

Computation and Language 2026-04-10 v2 Artificial Intelligence Software Engineering

Abstract

Do language model benchmarks actually measure what practitioners intend them to ? High-level metadata is too coarse to convey the granular reality of benchmarks: a "poetry" benchmark may never test for haikus, while "instruction-following" benchmarks will often test for an arbitrary mix of skills. This opacity makes verifying alignment with practitioner goals a laborious process, risking an illusion of competence even when models fail on untested facets of user interests. We introduce BenchBrowser, a retriever that surfaces evaluation items relevant to natural language use cases over 20 benchmark suites. Validated by a human study confirming high retrieval precision, BenchBrowser generates evidence to help practitioners diagnose low content validity (narrow coverage of a capability's facets) and low convergent validity (lack of stable rankings when measuring the same capability). BenchBrowser, thus, helps quantify a critical gap between practitioner intent and what benchmarks actually test.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2603.18019,
  title  = {BenchBrowser: Retrieving Evidence for Evaluating Benchmark Validity},
  author = {Harshita Diddee and Gregory Yauney and Swabha Swayamdipta and Daphne Ippolito},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.18019},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-01T11:26:44.104Z