Zero-shot Benchmarking: Flexible and Scalable Automatic Evaluation of LLMs

Tue Apr 07 2026 at 01:00 pm to 02:00 pm UTC+01:00

Instituto Superior Técnico, Anfiteatro PA2 | Lisboa

Priberam Labs
Publisher/HostPriberam Labs
Zero-shot Benchmarking: Flexible and Scalable Automatic Evaluation of LLMs
Advertisement
Priberam Machine Learning Lunch Seminar
About this Event

Abstract:

As language models improve and become capable of performing more complex tasks across modalities, evaluating them automatically becomes increasingly challenging. Developing strong and robust task-specific automatic metrics gets harder, and human-annotated test sets -- which are expensive to create -- saturate more quickly. A compelling alternative is to design reliable strategies to automate the creation of test data and evaluation, but previous attempts either rely on pre-existing data, or focus solely on individual tasks. We present Zero-shot Benchmarking (ZSB), a framework for creating high-quality benchmarks for any task by leveraging language models for both synthetic test data creation and evaluation. ZSB is simple and flexible: it requires only the creation of a prompt for data generation and one for evaluation; it is scalable to tasks and languages where collecting real-world data is costly or impractical; it is model-agnostic, allowing the creation of increasingly challenging benchmarks as models improve. To assess the effectiveness of our framework, we create benchmarks for five text-only tasks and a multi-modal one: general capabilities in four languages (English, Chinese, French, and Korean), translation, and general vision-language capabilities in English. We then rank a broad range of open and closed systems on our benchmarks. ZSB rankings consistently correlate strongly with human rankings, outperforming widely-adopted standard benchmarks. Through ablations, we find that strong benchmarks can be created with open models, and that judge model size and dataset variety are crucial drivers of performance. We release all our benchmarks, and code to reproduce our experiments and to produce new benchmarks.

Bio:

José Pombal is a Senior Research Scientist at Sword Health and a PhD student at IST, with his research focusing on the automatic evaluation of LLMs and their application to mental health therapy.

Advertisement

Event Venue & Nearby Stays

Instituto Superior Técnico, Anfiteatro PA2, 1 Avenida Rovisco Pais, Lisboa, Portugal

Tickets

EUR 0.00

Icon
Concerts, fests, parties, meetups - all the happenings, one place.

Ask AI if this event suits you:

More Events

Open Mic LX and Jam
Mon, 06 Apr at 07:30 pm Open Mic LX and Jam

Tribe Social Club - Cowork, Bar, Events

Republic of Comedy OPEN MIC!
Mon, 06 Apr at 08:30 pm Republic of Comedy OPEN MIC!

Xafarix

Backgammon Evening at Ando Living Rooftop
Tue, 07 Apr at 06:30 pm Backgammon Evening at Ando Living Rooftop

Ando Living Rooftop

"Write Now" with Virando a P\u00e1gina @ Good Company Books
Tue, 07 Apr at 06:30 pm "Write Now" with Virando a Página @ Good Company Books

Good Company Books

PAINTING EVENINGS - Art Club (1 session)
Tue, 07 Apr at 06:30 pm PAINTING EVENINGS - Art Club (1 session)

ArtZone Global

Presen\u00e7a digital essencial para com\u00e9rcio local
Tue, 07 Apr at 07:00 pm Presença digital essencial para comércio local

Lisbon City Hall - Campo Grande Central Building