BrightMind AI, Texas Tech University
Abstract:We read twelve well-known LLM agent benchmark papers and recorded, dimension by dimension, what each paper actually says about how its evaluation was run. The motivation came from a familiar frustration: two papers will report results on the same benchmark with the same model name and disagree, and you cannot tell why -- the scaffold, the sampling settings, the subset, or the evaluator version. In many cases the published artifact does not let you answer. This paper is an implementation report on the attempt. We designed a small audit schema (five fields: benchmark identity, harness specification, inference settings, cost reporting, failure breakdown), wrote a scoring codebook with the boundary cases we hit during pilot scoring, applied it to twelve canonical papers (eight agent, four classical static), and recorded what we saw. We score the disclosure of an agent run, not its correctness, and make no claim that disclosure implies a trustworthy result. The mean audit score across the eight agent-benchmark papers is 0.38 (out of 1.0), and across the four classical static benchmarks 0.66; the largest gap is on cost (none of the eight agent benchmark papers disclose inference cost in any form) and on harness specification (none fully disclose a content-addressed container image of the evaluation environment). We release the schema as a JSON Schema file, the codebook as a Markdown document, and the raw scoring sheet as a CSV. The scoring was performed by a single auditor in one pass; a multi-rater audit is the natural next step, and we discuss what we think it would change.
Abstract:The exponential growth of big data has intensified the need for efficient and interpretable machine learning models that can handle diverse data characteristics while maintaining computational efficiency. Knowledge distillation has primarily focused on neural network-to-neural network transfer, leaving cross-paradigm knowledge transfer largely unexplored. This paper presents the first comprehensive study of bidirectional knowledge distillation between Random Forests (RF) and Deep Neural Networks (DNN), addressing critical gaps in ensemble learning and model compression for big data applications. We propose novel methodologies including progressive multi-stage distillation, multi-teacher ensemble distillation from diverse tree models, and uncertainty-aware cross-paradigm transfer mechanisms. Through 144 comprehensive experiments across 6 diverse datasets encompassing classification and regression tasks, we demonstrate that bidirectional RF-DL distillation achieves competitive performance while providing complementary benefits: interpretability from tree models and expressiveness from neural networks. Our results show that multi-teacher ensemble distillation consistently outperforms traditional approaches, with NN-COMPACT achieving 98.13% classification accuracy and NN-WIDE reaching 92.6% R^2 score in regression tasks. The proposed framework enables deployment flexibility in big data environments, allowing optimal model selection based on computational constraints and interpretability requirements. This work establishes a new research direction in cross-paradigm knowledge transfer with significant implications for interpretable AI and scalable model deployment in resource-constrained big data systems.