# CreditAudit: 2nd Dimension for LLM Evaluation and Selection

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.02515 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.02515/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 23 Jan 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Evaluating Large Language Models Trained on Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.03374/) (2021)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Program Synthesis with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.07732/) (2021)
- [GPQA: A Graduate-Level Google-Proof Q&A Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.12022/) (2023)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [MMLU-Pro: A More Robust and Challenging Multi-Task Language Understanding Benchmark](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.01574/) (2024)
- [Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09261/) (2022)
- [Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04132/) (2024)
- [Lessons from the Trenches on Reproducible Evaluation of Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.14782/) (2024)
- [Towards Reproducible LLM Evaluation: Quantifying Uncertainty in LLM Benchmark Scores](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.03492/) (2024)
- [Information Capacity: Evaluating the Efficiency of Large Language Models via Text Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.08066/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Leaderboard scores on public benchmarks have been steadily rising and converging, with many frontier language models now separated by only marginal differences. However, these scores often fail to match users' day to day experience, because system prompts, output protocols, and interaction modes evolve under routine iteration, and in agentic multi step pipelines small protocol shifts can trigger disproportionate failures, leaving practitioners uncertain about which model to deploy. We propose CreditAudit, a deployment oriented credit audit framework that evaluates models under a family of semantically aligned and non adversarial system prompt templates across multiple benchmarks, reporting mean ability as average performance across scenarios and scenario induced fluctuation sigma as a stability risk signal, and further mapping volatility into interpretable credit grades from AAA to BBB via cross model quantiles with diagnostics that mitigate template difficulty drift. Controlled experiments on GPQA, TruthfulQA, and MMLU Pro show that models with similar mean ability can exhibit substantially different fluctuation, and stability risk can overturn prioritization decisions in agentic or high failure cost regimes. By providing a 2D and grade based language for regime specific selection, CreditAudit supports tiered deployment and more disciplined allocation of testing and monitoring effort, enabling more objective and trustworthy model evaluation for real world use.