Design Resumable Model Evaluation
Make interruption cheap and evidence comparable.
Freeze an evaluation revision
Create a unique revision for every combination of corpus membership, model, prompt/instructions, schema, decoder settings, validator, run count, and thresholds. Hash this configuration into the state file. Never seed a new revision from incompatible results.
Write the case manifest before inference. Select cases from stable metadata, not previous outcomes.
Persist atomically
Use an append-only result stream or atomically replace a small state file after every case/run. Store:
- case and run IDs;
- frozen configuration hash;
- raw and normalized output;
- parse, identifier, semantic, execution, and safety gate results;
- abstention and generation-failure status;
- start/end timestamps and latency;
- interruption and retry metadata.
On resume, validate the configuration hash, scan completed keys, and execute only missing (case, run) pairs. Deduplicate safely if a crash occurred after writing output but before updating summary state.
Preserve benchmark semantics
Evaluate first-attempt output with exactly one generation when that is the product question. Do not call production remediation, repair malformed JSON, or deterministically choose a fallback. Exercise remediation in a separate test and metric series.
Keep required run counts and thresholds unchanged. A resumable evaluator improves execution efficiency, not acceptance criteria.
Stop only on safe math
For a minimum rate t over N required trials, fail early only when even winning every remaining trial cannot reach the required successes:
successes + remaining < ceil(t * N)
For maximum-failure gates, stop only once the allowed failure count is irreversibly exceeded. Apply the same reasoning separately to each gate and subgroup. Do not early-pass unless all required trials are complete.
Report
Report completed and required runs, completed fixtures/cases, failures, abstentions, gate numerators and denominators, distribution/diversity gates, p50/p95 latency, interruptions, resumptions, and exact automated gate results. State which human, device, energy, usefulness, or product gates remain untested.