Paper Detail

Stress-Testing Efficient Responsible-AI Evaluation: When Compute Savings Change Benchmark Conclusions

Ahmed El Kady, Aravind Narayanan, Rehana Noorani, Yani Ioannou, Shaina Raza

arxiv Score 10.3

Published 2026-08-31 · First seen 2026-09-01

General AI

Abstract

Efficient evaluation changes the protocol used to support claims about model behavior, yet it is rarely tested whether those claims remain stable after the evaluation itself is made cheaper. We stress-test conclusion robustness in responsible-AI benchmarking by evaluating three dense and mixture-of-experts models on BBQ and BBQ-V under seven conditions spanning batching, quantization, benchmark reduction, and their combinations. Rather than treating preserved aggregate accuracy as sufficient, we compare accuracy, bias severity and prevalence, reasoning quality, subgroup behavior, subset-membership stability, runtime, and measured GPU energy against a full-benchmark BF16 baseline. Larger batching keeps accuracy within 0.35 percentage points of baseline and produces comparatively small subgroup changes, while reducing energy in five of six model--dataset settings. INT8 largely preserves quality but uses 1.79--4.26$\times$ baseline energy. INT4 causes larger, model- and context-dependent changes. Reduced benchmarks provide the most consistent savings, but very small subsets are substantially more sensitive to which items are retained. Efficient evaluation should therefore be treated as a measurement intervention whose validity must be checked across the conclusions the benchmark is intended to support. Our project website is https://vectorinstitute.github.io/sustainable-rai-evaluation/ and the code is available at https://github.com/VectorInstitute/sustainable-rai-evaluation.

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BibTeX

@article{kady2026stress,
  title = {Stress-Testing Efficient Responsible-AI Evaluation: When Compute Savings Change Benchmark Conclusions},
  author = {Ahmed El Kady and Aravind Narayanan and Rehana Noorani and Yani Ioannou and Shaina Raza},
  year = {2026},
  abstract = {Efficient evaluation changes the protocol used to support claims about model behavior, yet it is rarely tested whether those claims remain stable after the evaluation itself is made cheaper. We stress-test conclusion robustness in responsible-AI benchmarking by evaluating three dense and mixture-of-experts models on BBQ and BBQ-V under seven conditions spanning batching, quantization, benchmark reduction, and their combinations. Rather than treating preserved aggregate accuracy as sufficient, we},
  url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.31108},
  keywords = {cs.LG},
  eprint = {2608.31108},
  archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}

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