MMLU vs mlflow

Executes standardized few-shot prompting evaluation on language models across 57 subjects (STEM, humanities, social sciences, professional) by constructing few-shot prompts with 5 example question-answer pairs per subject, then measuring accuracy on held-out test sets. The system uses a hierarchical subject organization (e.g., STEM → physics → high school physics) and aggregates results at subject, category, and overall levels to produce granular performance metrics.

Unique: Organizes 15,908 questions hierarchically across 57 subjects with standardized few-shot prompting (5 examples per subject) and aggregates results at multiple granularity levels (subject, category, overall), enabling both broad coverage assessment and fine-grained domain analysis in a single evaluation run

vs alternatives: Broader coverage than domain-specific benchmarks (57 subjects vs 1-5) and more standardized than ad-hoc evaluation, making it the de facto general knowledge benchmark for LLM comparison in research and industry

Constructs few-shot prompts by formatting subject name, selecting 5 in-context examples from the training set, and appending the test question with multiple-choice options. The system implements format_subject() to normalize subject names, format_example() to structure each example as 'Question: ... Options: A) ... B) ... C) ... D) ... Answer: X', and gen_prompt() to concatenate examples with the target question. This approach ensures consistent prompt structure across all 57 subjects and enables reproducible few-shot evaluation.

Unique: Implements standardized prompt formatting functions (format_subject, format_example, gen_prompt) that ensure consistent structure across all 57 subjects, enabling reproducible few-shot evaluation and reducing prompt-induced variance in model performance measurement

vs alternatives: More reproducible than manual prompt engineering and more standardized than ad-hoc formatting, ensuring that performance differences reflect model capability rather than prompt variation

Truncates prompts to fit within model context windows using Byte Pair Encoding (BPE) tokenization. The crop.py system encodes prompts to BPE tokens, truncates to a maximum of 2048 tokens, and decodes back to text while preserving semantic coherence. This approach automatically downloads encoder resources (e.g., GPT-2 tokenizer) if not available locally and ensures prompts fit within typical model context limits without manual length estimation.

Unique: Implements automatic BPE-based prompt truncation with local caching of encoder resources, enabling context-aware evaluation without manual prompt length management or model-specific tokenizer configuration

vs alternatives: More robust than character-count-based truncation (which doesn't account for tokenization) and more general than model-specific truncation (which requires per-model configuration)

Measures how well-calibrated model predictions are using multiple calibration metrics: Expected Calibration Error (ECE), Static Calibration Error (SCE), Root Mean Square Calibration Error (RMSCE), Adaptive Calibration Error (ACE), and Threshold Adaptive Calibration Error (TACE). The calib_tools.py system supports different binning schemes (uniform, adaptive) and normalization methods, enabling analysis of whether model confidence scores align with actual accuracy across prediction classes. This is critical for understanding model reliability beyond raw accuracy.

Unique: Implements five distinct calibration metrics (ECE, SCE, RMSCE, ACE, TACE) with configurable binning schemes and normalization methods, enabling comprehensive analysis of model confidence calibration beyond simple accuracy measurement

vs alternatives: More comprehensive than single-metric calibration (e.g., ECE alone) and more flexible than fixed binning schemes, allowing researchers to identify calibration issues across different granularities and binning strategies

Organizes 57 subjects into a hierarchical taxonomy (e.g., STEM → Physics → High School Physics) and aggregates evaluation results at multiple levels: per-subject accuracy, per-category accuracy (e.g., all STEM subjects), and overall benchmark accuracy. The system uses categories.py to define the hierarchy and evaluate_flan.py to compute aggregated metrics, enabling both fine-grained analysis (which specific subjects are weak) and high-level comparison (overall model capability). This hierarchical structure mirrors how knowledge is organized in educational systems.

Unique: Implements hierarchical subject organization (57 subjects grouped into 4 major categories: STEM, humanities, social sciences, other) with multi-level result aggregation, enabling both granular subject-level analysis and high-level category comparison in a single evaluation framework

vs alternatives: More structured than flat subject lists and more informative than single overall scores, enabling researchers to identify domain-specific weaknesses and guide targeted model improvements

Provides a complete evaluation harness (evaluate_flan.py) that orchestrates the entire MMLU evaluation workflow: loading dataset, generating few-shot prompts, querying models, collecting predictions, computing accuracy, and aggregating results. The main() function coordinates these steps with configurable parameters (model selection, number of examples, output paths), ensuring reproducible evaluation across different models and runs. This harness abstracts away implementation details and provides a standard interface for model evaluation.

Unique: Provides a complete, self-contained evaluation harness that handles dataset loading, prompt generation, model querying, result collection, and aggregation in a single orchestrated workflow, eliminating the need for custom evaluation code

vs alternatives: More complete than individual evaluation functions and more reproducible than manual evaluation scripts, enabling consistent benchmarking across teams and time periods

Defines and maintains a hierarchical taxonomy of 57 subjects organized into 4 high-level categories (STEM, humanities, social sciences, professional). The categories.py module encodes this taxonomy as a structured data structure (likely a dictionary or class hierarchy) that maps subjects to categories, enabling consistent categorization across the evaluation pipeline. This taxonomy is used throughout the evaluation process for subject-level result aggregation, category-level analysis, and leaderboard organization.

Unique: Encodes a structured taxonomy of 57 subjects into 4 categories as a centralized, reusable data structure (categories.py), enabling consistent categorization across all evaluation and analysis code. This separation of taxonomy definition from evaluation logic allows researchers to analyze results at multiple levels of granularity without duplicating category mappings.

vs alternatives: Provides a centralized, version-controlled taxonomy compared to ad-hoc category definitions scattered across analysis scripts, ensuring consistency and enabling reproducible category-level analysis across publications.

MLflow provides dual-API experiment tracking through a fluent interface (mlflow.log_param, mlflow.log_metric) and a client-based API (MlflowClient) that both persist to pluggable storage backends (file system, SQL databases, cloud storage). The tracking system uses a hierarchical run context model where experiments contain runs, and runs store parameters, metrics, artifacts, and tags with automatic timestamp tracking and run lifecycle management (active, finished, deleted states).

Unique: Dual fluent and client API design allows both simple imperative logging (mlflow.log_param) and programmatic run management, with pluggable storage backends (FileStore, SQLAlchemyStore, RestStore) enabling local development and enterprise deployment without code changes. The run context model with automatic nesting supports both single-run and multi-run experiment structures.

vs alternatives: More flexible than Weights & Biases for on-premise deployment and simpler than Neptune for basic tracking, with zero vendor lock-in due to open-source architecture and pluggable backends

MLflow's Model Registry provides a centralized catalog for registered models with version control, stage management (Staging, Production, Archived), and metadata tracking. Models are registered from logged artifacts via the fluent API (mlflow.register_model) or client API, with each version immutably linked to a run artifact. The registry supports stage transitions with optional descriptions and user annotations, enabling governance workflows where models progress through validation stages before production deployment.

Unique: Integrates model versioning with run lineage tracking, allowing models to be traced back to exact training runs and datasets. Stage-based workflow model (Staging/Production/Archived) is simpler than semantic versioning but sufficient for most deployment scenarios. Supports both SQL and file-based backends with REST API for remote access.

vs alternatives: More integrated with experiment tracking than standalone model registries (Seldon, KServe), and simpler governance model than enterprise registries (Domino, Verta) while remaining open-source