Auditing the Audit: Five Failure Modes in Benchmark-Validity Audits
Governance frameworks ask AI providers and auditors for documented evaluation evidence, and perturbation-based construct-validity audits are a common form of that evidence. We argue the audits are themselves fragile: their conclusions can be silently manufactured by implementation details that readers cannot see in the reported numbers. We name five classes of pipeline failure and demonstrate each in a self-audit over safety benchmarks and open-weight instruction-tuned models. Under a unified six-point due-diligence gate, every cell lands in a non-confirmatory bucket, and no cell reaches confirmatory. The evidence here is a single two-model, five-benchmark case study, and F1--F5 is an ill...
| Authors | Yanhang Li, Zhichao Fan, Zexin Zhuang |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 1 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 1 July 2026 |
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