evaluating-llms-harness

Benchmark LLMs across 60+ academic tasks using the lm-evaluation-harness framework.

1|Updated Jun 1, 2026
One-click install
npx skills add https://github.com/Araara7/hermes-skills --skill evaluating-llms-harness-araara7
Or copy as Structured Prompt for Agent▼
Please help me install this Agent Skill.
Skill: evaluating-llms-harness
Source: https://github.com/Araara7/hermes-skills/tree/main/mlops/evaluation/lm-evaluation-harness
Command: npx skills add https://github.com/Araara7/hermes-skills --skill evaluating-llms-harness-araara7

SYSTEM DOCUMENTATION & REQUIREMENTS

💡 This Skill requires lm-eval, transformers, vllm, and includes references (resource) components.

What problem does it solve? Evaluating and comparing large language models requires standardized prompts, metrics, and benchmarks. This Skill provides reproducible LLM benchmarking across 60+ academic tasks (MMLU, GSM8K, HumanEval, TruthfulQA, HellaSwag) so you can measure model quality, compare models, and track training progress with industry-standard methodology. ## Core Features & Use Cases - Standardized Benchmarking: Run MMLU, GSM8K, HumanEval, HellaSwag, ARC, TruthfulQA, and 60+ other tasks with consistent prompts and metrics used by EleutherAI and HuggingFace. - Multi-Backend Support: Evaluate HuggingFace models, vLLM-accelerated inference (5-10x faster), quantized models, and API models (OpenAI, Anthropic, local OpenAI-compatible servers). - Training Progress Tracking: Automate periodic checkpoint evaluation during training and plot learning curves from JSON results. - Distributed Evaluation: Scale across GPUs with data parallelism, tensor parallelism, and pipeline parallelism for models up to 70B+ parameters. - Use Case: Compare Llama-2-7B, Mistral-7B, and Phi-2 on MMLU, GSM8K, HellaSwag, and TruthfulQA, then generate a markdown comparison table of results. ## Quick Start Ask the AI to evaluate a HuggingFace model like meta-llama/Llama-2-7b-hf on MMLU and GSM8K with 5-shot prompting and save the results to a JSON file.

Frequently Asked Questions about evaluating-llms-harness

High-intent search queries and answers about installing and using this skill.

FAQPage Schema
How do I benchmark an LLM on MMLU with lm-evaluation-harness?▼

Run lm_eval with --model hf, --model_args pretrained=your-model, --tasks mmlu, and --num_fewshot 5 for the standard 5-shot setting. Results with accuracy and standard error are saved to a JSON output file.

How can I speed up LLM evaluation with vLLM?▼

Use --model vllm instead of --model hf and set tensor_parallel_size in model_args. vLLM runs MMLU on a 7B model in 15-20 minutes versus about 2 hours with the standard HuggingFace backend.

Can lm-evaluation-harness evaluate OpenAI or Anthropic API models?▼

Yes, use openai-chat-completions or anthropic-chat model types with your API key exported. Chat APIs lack logprobs, so they only support generation tasks like MMLU and GSM8K, not perplexity tasks.

Why do I get out of memory errors during evaluation?▼

Reduce batch size, enable 8-bit or 4-bit quantization via load_in_8bit in model_args, or use parallelize=True to shard the model across GPUs. A 7B model needs about 16GB VRAM in bfloat16.

Why do my benchmark results differ from published scores?▼

Check that num_fewshot matches the paper (usually 5-shot), verify the exact task name, and confirm the model and tokenizer match. Sampling temperature and seed settings also affect generation-based tasks.

When should I use HELM or AlpacaEval instead of lm-evaluation-harness?▼

Use HELM for broader evaluation covering fairness, efficiency, and calibration, or AlpacaEval and MT-Bench for instruction-following and conversational evaluation judged by LLMs. lm-evaluation-harness is best for standardized academic benchmarks.