On the Optimality of Tracking Fisher Information in Adaptive Testing with Stochastic Binary Responses
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
We study the problem of estimating a continuous ability parameter from sequential binary responses by actively asking questions with varying difficulties, a setting that arises naturally in adaptive testing and online preference learning. Our goal is to certify that the estimate lies within a desired margin of error, using as few queries as possible. We propose a simple algorithm that adaptively selects questions to maximize Fisher information and updates the estimate using a method-of-moments approach, paired with a novel test statistic to decide when the estimate is accurate enough. We prove that this Fisher-tracking strategy achieves optimal performance in both fixed-confidence and fixed-budget regimes, which are commonly invested in the best-arm identification literature. Our analysis overcomes a key technical challenge in the fixed-budget setting -- handling the dependence between the evolving estimate and the query distribution -- by exploiting a structural symmetry in the model and combining large deviation tools with Ville's inequality. Our results provide rigorous theoretical support for simple and efficient adaptive testing procedures.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
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 it