Gaming Without an Attacker: Benchmark Fingerprinting in LLM-Driven Search Under Selection Pressure
Mirrored from arXiv — Machine Learning for archival readability. Support the source by reading on the original site.
Computer Science > Machine Learning
Title:Gaming Without an Attacker: Benchmark Fingerprinting in LLM-Driven Search Under Selection Pressure
Abstract:Benchmarks for systems that are optimized against the evaluation signal measure something different from what they claim. We document this concretely in two GPU-kernel-optimization suites with held-out generalization gates: Metal-Sci (10 scientific-compute tasks) and Metal-ZK (12 zero-knowledge/cryptographic tasks), in which three frontier LLMs (Opus 4.7, Gemini 3.1 Pro, GPT-5.5) propose Metal kernels inside a $(1{+}1)$ evolutionary loop with rich feedback. Although no model is prompted to act adversarially, the promoted winners repeatedly fingerprint the evaluation configuration: they branch on the identity of runtime parameters, tune the measured branch maximally, and leave the unmeasured branch slow or silently wrong. Across the pooled suites, $16/53$ ($30\%$) of in-distribution wins fail to transfer to held-out configurations. We give a four-mode taxonomy of these failures, from configuration fingerprints to gate leakage. We distill design guidance for measurement under strategic optimization: held-out probes retain validity only on non-enumerable axes; gates must measure held-out performance, not just correctness; and a transfer rate is interpretable only with per-failure mechanism grades: ours decomposes into gamed, overfit, and benign.
Code and research artifacts: this https URL
| Comments: | Published as a conference paper at AI Measurement Science Workshop @ COLM 2026 |
| Subjects: | Machine Learning (cs.LG); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2608.08722 [cs.LG] |
| (or arXiv:2608.08722v1 [cs.LG] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2608.08722
arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
|
Access Paper:
- View PDF
- HTML (experimental)
- TeX Source
References & Citations
Bookmark
Bibliographic and Citation Tools
Code, Data and Media Associated with this Article
Demos
Recommenders and Search Tools
arXivLabs: experimental projects with community collaborators
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
More from arXiv — Machine Learning
-
LoKiFormer: Locality-aware Attention with Decoupled Knowledge Memory for Efficient Large Language Model Pretraining
Aug 14
-
Which Site, and When: A Free-Satellite-Data Test of Himalayan Glacial Lake Bursts, Landslides, and Ice Floods
Aug 14
-
MARCH: Scaling Recurrent Memory with Content-Routed State Anchors
Aug 14
-
Multi-AUV Ad-hoc network-based Target Tracking: A Value Gradient Guidance Multi-Agent Diffusion Reinforcement Learning Approach
Aug 14
Discussion (0)
Sign in to join the discussion. Free account, 30 seconds — email code or GitHub.
Sign in →No comments yet. Sign in and be the first to say something.