cross-model evaluation

Alignment evaluation in machine learning has largely become evaluation of models. Influential benchmarks score model outputs under fixed inputs, such as truthfulness, instruction following, or pairwise preference, and these scores are often used to support claims about deployed alignment. This paper argues that deployment-relevant alignment cannot be inferred from model-level evaluation alone. Alignment claims should instead be indexed to the level at which evidence is collected: model-level, response-level, interaction-level, or deployment-level. Two studies support this position. First, a structured audit of eleven alignment benchmarks, extended to a sixteen-benchmark corpus, dual-coded against an eight-dimension rubric with Cohen's kappa = 0.87, finds that user-facing verification support is absent across every benchmark examined, while process steerability is nearly absent. The few interactional benchmarks identified, including tau-bench, CURATe, Rifts, and Common Ground, remain fragmented in coverage, and benchmark construction rather than data source determines what is measured. Second, a blinded cross-model stress test using 180 transcripts across three frontier models and four scaffolds finds that the same verification scaffold raises one model's verification support to ceiling while leaving another categorically unchanged. This shows that scaffold efficacy is model-dependent and that the gap identified by the audit cannot be closed at the model level alone. We propose a system-level evaluation agenda: alignment profiles instead of single scores, fixed-scaffolding protocols for comparable interactional evaluation, and reporting templates that make the inferential distance between evaluation evidence and deployment claims explicit.

Existing software modeling datasets are often ad hoc constructions lacking rigorous quality assurance, leading to research findings that are difficult to reproduce, compare, and prone to bias. This work proposes the first benchmarking framework specifically designed for model-driven engineering, treating datasets themselves as first-class evaluation targets. By defining clear metrics for quality, representativeness, and task suitability, the framework establishes a unified platform that enables automated analysis of modeling datasets across multiple languages and formats. For the first time, this approach facilitates systematic evaluation of modeling datasets, substantially enhancing the reproducibility, fairness, and scientific rigor of research in the field.

Traditional static test sets inadequately evaluate foundation models’ diverse capabilities in open-ended scenarios. To address this, we propose ONEBench—a dynamic, extensible benchmarking paradigm that enables on-demand generation of customized evaluation suites targeting open capabilities, framing model assessment as a collective selection and aggregation process over sample-level tests. Our key contributions include: (1) the first unified, open-ended, and evolvable evaluation framework operating at the sample level; (2) a sparse measurement aggregation algorithm, a progressive sample pool construction mechanism, and a cross-modal unified interface (ONEBench-LLM/LMM); and (3) a robustness-aware scoring model with theoretical guarantees on identifiability and fast convergence. Experiments show that ONEBench achieves ranking stability >0.98 under 95% measurement sparsity, reduces evaluation cost by 20×, and attains >0.98 correlation with mean-score rankings on homogeneous data—enabling unified, efficient, and reliable assessment of both language and multimodal models.

This work addresses the long-standing isolation among research domains such as alignment training, model organisms, and toy models, which has hindered empirical cross-pollination and led to redundant exploration and inefficiency. For the first time, it systematically transfers supervised fine-tuning (SFT) practices across these domains by integrating cross-model output training, mixed-strategy data, and benign fine-tuning to rigorously evaluate the portability of key findings. The study demonstrates three successful transfer effects: enhanced behavioral generalization, mitigation of capability degradation, and the critical insight that preserving capabilities alone is insufficient to ensure robustness in subsequent training phases. These results underscore both the efficacy and limitations of reusing methodologies across domains, thereby fostering more synergistic development across disparate research areas.

This work addresses the poor generalization of existing domain-specific code models under distribution shifts and the absence of training-free tools for integrating multiple models to support software engineering tasks. The paper introduces MergeSE, the first end-to-end, training-free model merging framework tailored for software engineering classification tasks—such as code clone detection and vulnerability identification. MergeSE integrates five state-of-the-art algorithms, including TIES and DARE-TIES, and provides functionalities for task registration, compatibility diagnosis, deterministic merging, and one-click deployment. It merges two 124-million-parameter models on CPU in under five seconds, recovers 93% of multi-task performance under cross-language and AI-generated code scenarios, achieves up to a fourfold improvement in generalization, and produces results consistent with reference implementations.