Utility is in the Eye of the User: A Critique of NLP Leaderboards
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Benchmarks such as GLUE have helped drive advances in NLP by incentivizing the creation of more accurate models.While this leaderboard paradigm has been remarkably successful, a historical focus on performance-based evaluation has been at the expense of other qualities that the NLP community values in models, such as compactness, fairness, and energy efficiency.In this opinion paper, we study the divergence between what is incentivized by leaderboards and what is useful in practice through the lens of microeconomic theory.We frame both the leaderboard and NLP practitioners as consumers and the benefit they get from a model as its utility to them.With this framing, we formalize how leaderboards -in their current form -can be poor proxies for the NLP community at large.For example, a highly inefficient model would provide less utility to practitioners but not to a leaderboard, since it is a cost that only the former must bear.To allow practitioners to better estimate a model's utility to them, we advocate for more transparency on leaderboards, such as the reporting of statistics that are of practical concern (e.g., model size, energy efficiency, and inference latency).
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.083 | 0.263 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.025 |
| Open science | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Research integrity | 0.012 | 0.022 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".