The Capability Frontier: Benchmarks Miss 82% of Model Performance

Existing benchmarks typically report accuracy for a single model on a single run. This systematically understates real-world LLM capabilities, particularly under heterogeneous data distributions: (i) different models get different questions correct according to their specializations, and (ii) given a budget, multiple generations can be sampled and selectively retained. To quantify this gap, we introduce the Capability Frontier: a Pareto frontier over a set of models that characterizes the best achievable performance at each cost level under optimal selection across models and generations (i.e., via an oracle). Our construction corrects for two opposing biases: underestimation from single-model evaluation and overestimation from taking maxima over noisy samples. We study 21 LLMs across 16 widely used benchmarks spanning coding, reasoning, medicine, factuality, instruction following, and agentic tasks, comparing Capability Frontier performance at matched cost to each benchmark's top-performing model. Correcting for single-model evaluation yields a 54% error rate reduction; additionally correcting for single runs yields an 82% improvement, with SOTA accuracy matched at 85% cost reduction. Complementing these empirical results, we use controlled probabilistic simulations to show that higher query topic entropy produces a near-monotonic increase in the performance gap between oracle routing and the best single model. Our findings suggest collective LLM capabilities are substantially underestimated, with implications for evaluation and deployment in data-heterogeneous, multi-domain settings.

Approximating Human Preferences Using a Multi-Judge Learned System

Aligning LLM-based judges with human preferences is a significant challenge, as they are difficult to calibrate and often suffer from rubric sensitivity, bias, and instability. Overcoming this challenge advances key applications, such as creating reliable reward models for Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and building effective routing systems that select the best-suited model for a given user query. In this work, we propose a framework for modeling diverse, persona-based preferences by learning to aggregate outputs from multiple rubric-conditioned judges. We investigate the performance of this approach against naive baselines and assess its robustness through case studies on both human and LLM-judges biases. Our primary contributions include a persona-based method for synthesizing preference labels at scale and two distinct implementations of our aggregator: Generalized Additive Model (GAM) and a Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP).