kalarislabs/research-agent-skills/evaluating-llms-harness
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Evaluates LLMs across 60+ academic benchmarks (MMLU, HumanEval, GSM8K, TruthfulQA, HellaSwag). Use when benchmarking model quality, comparing models, reporting academic results, or tracking training progress. Industry standard used by EleutherAI, HuggingFace, and major labs. Supports HuggingFace, vLLM, APIs.
Install
npx vskill@latest install kalarislabs/research-agent-skills/evaluating-llms-harnessSKILL.md
lm-evaluation-harness - LLM Benchmarking
Quick start
lm-evaluation-harness evaluates LLMs across 60+ academic benchmarks using standardized prompts and metrics.
Installation:
Evaluate any HuggingFace model:
View available tasks:
Common workflows
Workflow 1: Standard benchmark evaluation
Evaluate model on core benchmarks (MMLU, GSM8K, HumanEval).
Copy this checklist:
Step 1: Choose benchmark suite
Core reasoning benchmarks:
- MMLU (Massive Multitask Language Understanding) - 57 subjects, multiple choice
- GSM8K - Grade school math word problems
- HellaSwag - Common sense reasoning
- TruthfulQA - Truthfulness and factuality
- ARC (AI2 Reasoning Challenge) - Science questions
Code benchmarks:
- HumanEval - Python code generation (164 problems)
- MBPP (Mostly Basic Python Problems) - Python coding
Standard suite (recommended for model releases):
Step 2: Configure model
HuggingFace model:
Quantized model (4-bit/8-bit):
Custom checkpoint:
Step 3: Run evaluation
Step 4: Analyze results
Results saved to results/llama2-7b-eval.json:
Workflow 2: Track training progress
Evaluate checkpoints during training.
Step 1: Set up periodic evaluation
Evaluate every N training steps:
Step 2: Choose quick benchmarks
Fast benchmarks for frequent evaluation:
- HellaSwag: ~10 minutes on 1 GPU
- GSM8K: ~5 minutes
- PIQA: ~2 minutes
Avoid for frequent eval (too slow):
- MMLU: ~2 hours (57 subjects)
- HumanEval: Requires code execution
Step 3: Automate evaluation
Integrate with training script:
Or use PyTorch Lightning callbacks:
Step 4: Plot learning curves
Workflow 3: Compare multiple models
Benchmark suite for model comparison.
Step 1: Define model list
Step 2: Run evaluations
Step 3: Generate comparison table
Output:
Workflow 4: Evaluate with vLLM (faster inference)
Use vLLM backend for 5-10x faster evaluation.
Step 1: Install vLLM
Step 2: Configure vLLM backend
Step 3: Run evaluation
vLLM is 5-10× faster than standard HuggingFace:
When to use vs alternatives
Use lm-evaluation-harness when:
- Benchmarking models for academic papers
- Comparing model quality across standard tasks
- Tracking training progress
- Reporting standardized metrics (everyone uses same prompts)
- Need reproducible evaluation
Use alternatives instead:
- HELM (Stanford): Broader evaluation (fairness, efficiency, calibration)
- AlpacaEval: Instruction-following evaluation with LLM judges
- MT-Bench: Conversational multi-turn evaluation
- Custom scripts: Domain-specific evaluation
Common issues
Details, code examples and parameter tables: references/common-issues.md. Read it when this step applies.
Advanced topics
Benchmark descriptions: See references/benchmark-guide.md for detailed description of all 60+ tasks, what they measure, and interpretation.
Custom tasks: See references/custom-tasks.md for creating domain-specific evaluation tasks.
API evaluation: See references/api-evaluation.md for evaluating OpenAI, Anthropic, and other API models.
Multi-GPU strategies: See references/distributed-eval.md for data parallel and tensor parallel evaluation.
Hardware requirements
Details, code examples and parameter tables: references/hardware-requirements.md. Read it when this step applies.
Resources
- GitHub: https://github.com/EleutherAI/lm-evaluation-harness
- Docs: https://github.com/EleutherAI/lm-evaluation-harness/tree/main/docs
- Task library: 60+ tasks including MMLU, GSM8K, HumanEval, TruthfulQA, HellaSwag, ARC, WinoGrande, etc.
- Leaderboard: https://huggingface.co/spaces/HuggingFaceH4/open_llm_leaderboard (uses this harness)
Agent operating procedure
- Check the environment. Confirm the model, checkpoint, benchmark version and evaluation harness version.
- Pin down the inputs. Confirm formats, identifiers and parameters from the data or the user. Ask rather than guess any value that changes the result.
- Run a small version first. Evaluate on a small subset to verify prompts, parsing and scoring.
- Execute the full task using the instructions and references above.
- Validate the result. Use the benchmark's official splits and metrics; check for contamination; report variance across seeds or prompts.
- Report. State what was run (versions, commands, parameters), what was checked, and what is still uncertain.
| If this happens | Do this | |
|---|---|---|
| Scores differ from published numbers | Check prompt format, few-shot settings and harness version before concluding. | |
| A function, flag or endpoint in these instructions is missing in the installed version | Check the installed version's own documentation (help(), --help, official docs), adapt, and tell the user. Never invent an API. | |
| A required input, identifier or parameter is ambiguous | Ask the user, or state the assumption explicitly before running. |
Integrity rules
- Never fabricate results, parameters, identifiers, citations or statistics. If something cannot be run or verified, say so plainly.
- Report evaluation settings in full; never cherry-pick prompts, seeds or subsets.
- Treat version-specific details here as possibly outdated: confirm them against the official documentation for the installed version.
- Ask before actions that cost money, consume shared GPUs or cloud quota, touch personal or patient data, or cannot be undone.
Related skills
This is the start of the file. Read the full SKILL.md on GitHub.
Security
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Quality evaluation
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Source
- SKILL.md in the repositoryCheckingskills/evaluating-llms-harness/SKILL.md
Popularity
- Repository stars
- 1
- 7-day trend score
- 8
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