针对大模型极低故障率的高效评估难题,提出聚焦高风险输入的采样方法。
Measuring Five-Nines Reliability: Sample-Efficient LLM Evaluation in Saturated Benchmarks
- 用交叉熵法学习高故障风险输入的采样分布,避开盲目随机测试。
- 在三个模型上实现最多156.22倍的推理量节省,精度仍可保证。
- 揭示标准评测无法区分的模型间可靠性差异,适合高安全场景应用。
现有基准测试显示大语言模型(LLMs)在各类任务上表现接近完美,但这种饱和现象掩盖了其可靠性评估的必要性。在实际部署中,达到极高可靠性(如五九可靠度99.999%)至关重要,因该差距会导致故障数量级增加,对关键应用而言是灾难性的。然而,在计算资源受限时,用传统蒙特卡洛方法估算如此罕见的故障概率需巨大推理开销,不可行。本文发现:在参数化输入空间中,少数输入导致多数故障,具有显著系统性。基于此,我们采用交叉熵方法(CEM)学习集中于高故障风险输入的采样分布。在Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct、gpt-oss-20b-low和Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite三个模型上,基于参数化GSM8K模板测试,相较均匀采样最多减少156.22倍推理量。结果表明,看似性能相近的模型在故障率估计上存在显著差异,说明可靠性是可测量且独立于准确率的模型质量维度。本框架为极端可靠性评估提供了简单而实用的解决方案,拓展了大模型评估的新维度。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
While existing benchmarks demonstrate the near-perfect performance of large language models (LLMs) on various tasks, this apparent saturation often obscures the need for rigorous evaluation of their reliability. In real-world deployment, however, achieving extremely high reliability (e.g., "five-nines" (99.999%) vs. "three-nines" (99.9%)) is fundamentally critical, as this gap results in an order-of-magnitude increase in failures, which is catastrophic in reliability-critical applications. Still, estimating such a rare failure probability with tight confidence bounds requires prohibitively large LLM inference sizes, making standard Monte Carlo evaluation infeasible under limited compute budgets. In this paper, we observe that LLM failures exhibit strong systematic patterns: across broad parameterized input spaces, a small subset of inputs disproportionately accounts for the majority of failures. Leveraging this observation, we propose to learn a sampling distribution concentrated on failure-prone inputs via the cross-entropy method (CEM). We evaluate our framework on three LLMs, Qwen2.5-Math-7B-Instruct, gpt-oss-20b-low, and Gemini 2.5 Flash Lite, across parameterized GSM8K templates and achieve up to 156.22x reduction in required inferences compared to naive uniform sampling. Our estimates reveal that models with indistinguishable accuracy on standard benchmarks can differ substantially in estimated failure rates, underscoring that reliability is a distinct and measurable axis of model quality. Our simple yet practical framework enables the evaluation of extreme reliability in LLMs, a distinct and underexplored dimension of evaluation beyond existing benchmarks, for their growing use in reliability-sensitive applications.
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