evaluating-llms-harness

Evaluates LLMs across 60+ academic benchmarks using standardized prompts and metrics.

1|Updated Mar 5, 2026
One-click install
npx skills add https://github.com/Clay-HHK/claude-skills --skill evaluating-llms-harness-clay-hhk
Or copy as Structured Prompt for Agent▼
Please help me install this Agent Skill.
Skill: evaluating-llms-harness
Source: https://github.com/Clay-HHK/claude-skills/tree/main/lm-evaluation-harness
Command: npx skills add https://github.com/Clay-HHK/claude-skills --skill evaluating-llms-harness-clay-hhk

SYSTEM DOCUMENTATION & REQUIREMENTS

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

What problem does it solve? Benchmarking language models consistently is difficult because results vary with prompts, few-shot settings, and evaluation code. This Skill standardizes LLM evaluation across 60+ academic benchmarks (MMLU, GSM8K, HumanEval, TruthfulQA, HellaSwag) so results are reproducible and comparable across models, checkpoints, and papers. ## Core Features & Use Cases - Standardized Benchmark Suites: Run MMLU, GSM8K, HellaSwag, ARC, TruthfulQA, HumanEval, and more with one command against HuggingFace, vLLM, or API-based models. - Training Progress Tracking: Evaluate checkpoints periodically during training and plot learning curves from saved JSON results. - Model Comparison Tables: Batch-evaluate multiple models and generate side-by-side comparison tables for papers or release decisions. - Distributed & API Evaluation: Scale with vLLM tensor/data parallelism, multi-GPU accelerate launches, or evaluate OpenAI and Anthropic API models. - Use Case: Before releasing a fine-tuned 7B model, run the standard suite (mmlu,gsm8k,hellaswag,truthfulqa,arc_challenge) with 5-shot prompting, then compare scores against Llama-2 and Mistral baselines in a markdown table. ## Quick Start Ask the AI to evaluate your HuggingFace model on MMLU, GSM8K, and HellaSwag 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 evaluate a HuggingFace model on MMLU?▼

Run lm_eval with --model hf, --model_args pretrained=your-model, --tasks mmlu, and --num_fewshot 5 for the standard 5-shot setting. Add --batch_size auto and --output_path to save results as JSON.

How to speed up lm-evaluation-harness benchmarks?▼

Use the vLLM backend with --model vllm for 5-10x faster inference, or run data-parallel evaluation with accelerate launch --multi_gpu. Reducing num_fewshot to 0 and using task subsets like mmlu_stem also cuts runtime.

Can lm-eval evaluate OpenAI or Anthropic API models?▼

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

Why are my benchmark scores different from published results?▼

Mismatches usually come from wrong few-shot counts (most papers use 5-shot), incorrect task names, or tokenizer mismatches. Verify num_fewshot, the exact task identifier, and that the tokenizer matches the model.

How do I evaluate a model too large for one GPU?▼

Use tensor parallelism: with vLLM set tensor_parallel_size to split weights across GPUs, or with HuggingFace use parallelize=True in model_args. A 70B bf16 model needs roughly 4-8 GPUs depending on memory.

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 quality judged by LLMs. lm-evaluation-harness is best for standardized academic accuracy benchmarks.