When No Benchmark Exists: Validating Comparative LLM Safety Scoring Without Ground-Truth Labels
Many deployments must compare candidate language models for safety before a labeled benchmark exists for the relevant language, sector, or regulatory regime. We formalize this setting as benchmarkless comparative safety scoring and specify the contract under which a scenario-based audit can be interpreted as deployment evidence. Scores are valid only under a fixed scenario pack, rubric, auditor, judge, sampling configuration, and rerun budget. Because no labels are available, we replace ground-truth agreement with an instrumental-validity chain: responsiveness to a controlled safe-versus-abliterated contrast, dominance of target-driven variance over auditor and judge artifacts, and stabil...
| Authors | Sushant Gautam, Finn Schwall, Annika Willoch Olstad et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 7 May 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 7 May 2026 |
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