Can you recommend a benchmark suite for comparative model testing and safety regression coverage?

A good choice depends on whether you want to measure general capability, domain-specific performance, or safety regressions. For comparative model testing plus safety regression coverage, I’d recommend a suite-based approach rather than a single benchmark.

Strong practical recommendation

Use a combination of:

1. HELM

   • Best for broad, standardized comparison across models.
   • Covers multiple scenarios: accuracy, robustness, calibration, bias, toxicity, etc.
   • Good if you want a “dashboard” style evaluation with repeatability.

2. LMSYS / Chatbot Arena-style human preference evals

   • Useful for comparative model quality in instruction-following/chat settings.
   • Less about safety coverage, more about relative user-perceived quality.

3. Safety-specific benchmark set

   • AdvBench: adversarial harmful instruction following.
   • StrongREJECT: refusal quality and jailbreak resistance.
   • RealToxicityPrompts: toxicity continuation risk.
   • TruthfulQA: helpful for hallucination/misleading-answer safety-adjacent behavior.
   • HarmBench: broader harmful behavior taxonomy and model refusal/compliance testing.

If you want one “best overall” suite

I’d suggest:

• HELM for broad comparative regression tracking
• plus HarmBench + StrongREJECT for safety regressions
• plus MMLU / GSM8K / GPQA if you also want capability tracking

Why this mix works

• Comparative testing needs stable, repeatable tasks with clear metrics.
• Safety regression coverage needs targeted adversarial prompts and harmful-behavior categories.
• No single benchmark fully covers both well.

A simple evaluation matrix

If you’re building a CI-style model test harness, a useful minimal set is:

• Capability: MMLU, GSM8K, GPQA
• Instruction/chat quality: MT-Bench or Arena-style pairwise evals
• Safety: HarmBench, StrongREJECT, AdvBench
• Toxicity: RealToxicityPrompts
• Factuality/safety-adjacent: TruthfulQA

Final recommendation

If you want the most balanced answer:
HELM + HarmBench + StrongREJECT is a strong core suite for comparative testing and safety regression monitoring.

If you want, I can also recommend:

• a minimal benchmark stack for CI,
• a more comprehensive enterprise suite, or
• a suite tailored to text-only vs multimodal models.