One Capability or Many? Structural and Predictive Tests of Benchmark Validity Disagree About Economic Benchmarks for Frontier AI
Frontier-model leaderboards now rank systems on economic benchmarks, and those rankings inform what organisations buy and what regulators scrutinise. Whether such benchmarks measure a capability distinct from general test-taking is a question of construct validity that a structural test and a predictive test can answer in opposite ways. We show that they do on a hash-pinned snapshot of a frontier leaderboard with 421 model configurations across twelve benchmarks, four of them economic, of which 103 configurations carry all three sparsely scored economic benchmarks and 96 carry all twelve; four hypotheses and their thresholds were fixed before analysis, and every deviation from the plan is...
| Authors | Louis Yiven Zhu |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.LG |
| Published | 29 August 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 25 September 2026 |
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