How to Evaluate When You Don't Know How to Evaluate? Choosing Reliable Setups for Base Language Model Benchmarking

Evaluation of large language models (LLMs) remains largely pre-scientific: it involves many design decisions, with little guidance on how to make them. These choices can substantially affect measured performance and, consequently, decisions about subsequent pretraining. To identify effective evaluation setups, we investigate 8 aspects, such as task formulation or the number of in-context examples. We compare the setups using three widely-used signal criteria, repurposed as normative meta-measures: monotonicity, non-randomness, and ranking consistency of the evaluation scores across intermediate checkpoints. In an early pretraining scenario, we evaluate these setups on 26 monolingual 2B-parameter models trained on different types of data, using 80 tasks in four languages. We also examine the setups on three larger LLMs (≥7B) in the same four languages and explore how the preferred setups change with model scale. Our results yield concrete recommendations: some choices, such as the use of multiple prompts, are consistently useful, whereas others, such as task formulation, depend on model scale. More generally, our framework serves as a recipe for the choice of evaluation setups in new scenarios.