Evaluation Methodology

Core Principles

ATLAS evaluation verifies that the adaptive dual-agent loop (student + verifying teacher) improves outcomes without degrading performance for capable students. The framework measures both quantitative metrics and qualitative guidance effectiveness.

Non-Degradation

Ensure teaching never harms performance (≥97% safety rate)

Efficiency

Measure token reduction and speed improvements

Generalization

Validate across diverse tasks and model scales

Evaluation Protocol

Two-Pass Comparison Framework

Baseline Measurement

Run student model independently on evaluation tasks:

baseline_response = student_model.generate(task)
baseline_accuracy = evaluate(baseline_response)

Dual-Agent Evaluation

Apply ATLAS two-pass protocol:

# Pass 1: Diagnostic probe (≤50 tokens)
capability = teacher.diagnose(student_response)

# Pass 2: Verifying-teacher guidance (≤200 tokens)
guidance = teacher.generate_guidance(capability, task)
enhanced_response = student.generate(task, guidance)

Performance Comparison

Calculate improvement metrics:

improvement = enhanced_accuracy - baseline_accuracy
non_degradation = (improvement >= 0)
efficiency_gain = (baseline_tokens - enhanced_tokens) / baseline_tokens

Non-Degradation Verification

Critical safety metric ensuring teaching never makes performance worse:

Metric	Definition	Target	Achieved
NDR (Non-Degradation Rate)	% of interactions with improvement ≥ 0	≥99%	97%
Degradation Severity	Average loss when degradation occurs	<5%	3.2%
Recovery Rate	% of degraded cases recovered in retry	>80%	82%

Efficiency Metrics

Comprehensive measurement of resource utilization:

# Teaching Efficiency Score (TES)
TES = (accuracy_gain * completion_rate) / (teaching_tokens / 1000)

# Learning Rate (LR)
LR = Δ_performance / num_interactions

# Token Efficiency
efficiency = 1 - (enhanced_tokens / baseline_tokens)

Evaluation Commands

Full Benchmark Suite

Complete evaluation with detailed logging:

# Run comprehensive evaluation
scripts/launch_with_server.sh 1 3 src/atlas_core/configs/recipe/teacher_rcl.yaml \
  model_name_or_path=results/pre_rl_model \
  dataset_id_or_path=Arc-Intelligence/Arc-ATLAS-Teach-v0 \
  eval_steps=50 \
  log_completions=true \
  save_completions_probability=0.1 \
  num_generations=32

Quick Validation

Rapid testing for development iterations:

# Minimal evaluation (4 steps)
scripts/launch_with_server.sh 1 1 src/atlas_core/configs/recipe/teacher_rcl.yaml \
  report_to=null \
  max_steps=4 \
  eval_steps=1

Production Evaluation

Full-scale testing with statistical validation:

# Multi-seed evaluation for significance testing
for seed in 42 1337 2024; do
  scripts/launch_with_server.sh 4 4 src/atlas_core/configs/recipe/teacher_rcl.yaml \
    seed=$seed \
    output_dir=results/eval_seed_$seed \
    dataset_id_or_path=Arc-Intelligence/Arc-ATLAS-Teach-v0
done

Data Collection Framework

Quantitative Metrics

Performance
Efficiency
Robustness

Accuracy improvements vs baseline
Task completion rates
Per-category performance breakdown
Statistical significance (p-values)

Qualitative Analysis

Systematic review of teaching quality:

Diagnostic Accuracy: How well does the probe identify capability gaps?
Teaching Relevance: Is guidance targeted to identified weaknesses?
Adaptation Quality: Does teaching adjust to student skill level?
Failure Patterns: What causes degradation or teaching failures?

Statistical Validation

Significance Testing

All results require statistical validation:

from scipy import stats

def validate_improvement(baseline_scores, enhanced_scores):
    # Paired t-test for matched samples
    t_stat, p_value = stats.ttest_rel(enhanced_scores, baseline_scores)

    # Cohen's d for effect size
    diff = np.mean(enhanced_scores - baseline_scores)
    pooled_std = np.sqrt((np.var(baseline_scores) + np.var(enhanced_scores)) / 2)
    cohens_d = diff / pooled_std

    return {
        'significant': p_value < 0.001,
        'p_value': p_value,
        'effect_size': cohens_d,
        'improvement': diff
    }

Sample Size Requirements

Confidence Level	Effect Size	Required Samples
95%	Large (0.8)	26 per condition
95%	Medium (0.5)	64 per condition
99%	Large (0.8)	42 per condition
99%	Medium (0.5)	106 per condition

Expected Outcomes

Successful evaluation demonstrates:

Closed-Loop Accuracy

+15–30% lift with the dual-agent runtime (student + verifying teacher)

Offline GRPO

Sustained improvements by training on exported runtime traces

Completion

~100% vs ~69% baseline

Efficiency

~50% token reduction with teaching

Error Analysis Framework

Failure Mode Categorization

Category	Frequency	Mitigation
Parsing errors	2.1%	Improved normalization
Over-teaching	0.9%	Adaptive threshold tuning
Capability mismatch	0.5%	Enhanced diagnostic probes
Template failures	0.3%	Expanded template coverage

Diagnostic Accuracy

Measure probe effectiveness:

def evaluate_diagnostic_accuracy(probe_results, actual_performance):
    # Categories: weak, medium, strong
    predicted_level = categorize_capability(probe_results)
    actual_level = categorize_performance(actual_performance)

    accuracy = (predicted_level == actual_level).mean()
    confusion_matrix = create_confusion_matrix(predicted_level, actual_level)

    return accuracy, confusion_matrix

Scalability Testing

Model Size Scaling

Student Model	Teacher Model	Improvement	Efficiency
4B params	8B params	+18.2%	0.42 TES
7B params	8B params	+15.7%	0.38 TES
13B params	8B params	+12.3%	0.35 TES
70B params	8B params	+8.9%	0.31 TES

Infrastructure Scaling

Configuration	Throughput	Latency (p50)	Latency (p99)
1×T4 GPU	2 req/min	30s	45s
4×A100	16 req/min	3.75s	5.2s
8×H100	64 req/min	0.94s	1.3s

Reproducibility Requirements

Environment Specification

# Required in reproduction logs
hardware:
  gpus: 4×H100
  memory: 128GB
  interconnect: NVLink
software:
  python: 3.11.4
  pytorch: 2.1.0
  transformers: 4.36.0
  vllm: 0.2.7

Configuration Documentation

# Save all overrides
echo "Configuration:" > eval_config.txt
echo "model_name_or_path=$MODEL" >> eval_config.txt
echo "dataset_id_or_path=$DATASET" >> eval_config.txt
echo "seed=$SEED" >> eval_config.txt

Artifact Preservation

Training logs (wandb or tensorboard)
Metric summaries (JSON format)
Representative examples (10% sampling)
Configuration files (complete YAML)

Next Steps

Reproduction Guide

Reproduce our findings

Run Evaluation

Start your evaluation

​Core Principles

Non-Degradation

Efficiency

Generalization

​Evaluation Protocol

​Two-Pass Comparison Framework

​Non-Degradation Verification

​Efficiency Metrics

​Evaluation Commands

​Full Benchmark Suite

​Quick Validation

​Production Evaluation

​Data Collection Framework

​Quantitative Metrics

​Qualitative Analysis

​Statistical Validation

​Significance Testing

​Sample Size Requirements

​Expected Outcomes

Closed-Loop Accuracy

Offline GRPO

Completion

Efficiency

​Error Analysis Framework

​Failure Mode Categorization

​Diagnostic Accuracy

​Scalability Testing

​Model Size Scaling

​Infrastructure Scaling

​Reproducibility Requirements

​Next Steps

Reproduction Guide

Run Evaluation

Core Principles

Evaluation Protocol

Two-Pass Comparison Framework

Non-Degradation Verification

Efficiency Metrics

Evaluation Commands

Full Benchmark Suite

Quick Validation

Production Evaluation

Data Collection Framework

Quantitative Metrics

Qualitative Analysis

Statistical Validation

Significance Testing

Sample Size Requirements

Expected Outcomes

Error Analysis Framework

Failure Mode Categorization

Diagnostic Accuracy

Scalability Testing

Model Size Scaling

Infrastructure Scaling

Reproducibility Requirements

Next Steps