RepBench: Compiling Benchmarks into Capability Representations for Large Language Models
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Abstract (arXiv)
Representation engineering reads and steers capability directions in large language models, yet methods are typically evaluated on paper-specific synthetic data. The resulting measurements are difficult to compare or reproduce and may reflect surface patterns rather than capabilities. We present RepBench, a benchmark-grounded data layer for capability-aligned representation probing. Crawling 13,427 benchmark papers yields a taxonomy of 182 capability clusters in 13 families; harvesting 353 public benchmark datasets yields 46,149 audited probe texts covering 94 capabilities, each supported by at least two independent benchmarks. This multi-benchmark design reduces dependence on any single source: raw per-text vectors exhibit no natural cluster granularity, whereas benchmark-pooled capability vectors show an interior clustering optimum at a small number of clusters on all 12 evaluated models, with low agreement to the human taxonomy. Under cross-benchmark transfer evaluation across twelve models completed by all four readouts, difference-in-means attains the highest model-level mean on ten models, while logistic regression wins the most capability-model cells. This disagreement shows that the readout method and aggregation criterion are meaningful evaluation dimensions. The pipeline, corpus, and evaluation code are released as a reusable closed-loop workflow.
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References · 26
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- 2025Toward universal steering and monitoring of AI modelscited by 29
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- 2026Why Steering Works: Toward a Unified View of Language Model Parameter Dynamicscited by 8
14 more
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- 2025The Impact of Off-Policy Training Data on Probe Generalisationcited by 6
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- 2026Convergent Evolution: How Different Language Models Learn Similar Number Representationscited by 5
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- 2026Understanding and Enforcing Weight Disentanglement in Task Arithmeticcited by 3
- 2025Decomposing Theory of Mind: How Emotional Processing Mediates ToM Abilities in LLMscited by 1
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