Tail-Shape Estimation in LLM Evaluation Is Fragile: A Protocol for Diagnosing False Positives

Abstract:Recent work motivates moving large language model (LLM) evaluation from mean-based to tail-aware metrics, including conditional value-at-risk and tail-index estimates of reward-model error. We ask whether the canonical extreme-value-theory tail-index parameter, which isolates how heavy a tail is from how large the tail mass is, adds discriminative information beyond the mean and a standard tail-magnitude statistic in LLM evaluation. We pre-register a protocol covering admissibility, goodness-of-fit, threshold-stability, and effect-size requirements for any positive tail-shape claim. The protocol is the contribution of this paper; the empirical study below is a demonstration of what its gates catch. Applied to a standard LLM toxicity-evaluation setup under two structurally different scorer families, the protocol catches three distinct modes of false positives that a naive analysis would have published, and rejects the headline tail-shape claim on both scorers. We conclude that tail-shape estimation in the LLM toxicity-evaluation setups we examined is more fragile than the recent literature suggests, and recommend the protocol as a starting point for tail-index claims in similar setups.

Machine Learning (cs.LG)

arXiv:2606.16511 [cs.LG]

(or arXiv:2606.16511v1 [cs.LG] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2606.16511 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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