FEval-TTC: Fair Evaluation Protocol for Test-Time Compute

Abstract: The performance of LLMs and the associated dollar costs of API calls can fluctuate over time, potentially invalidating conclusions drawn in prior research. To address this, we propose a Fair Evaluation protocol for Test-Time Compute (FEval-TTC), designed to ensure consistent assessment of test-time compute (TTC) methods, regardless of such fluctuations. FEval-TTC focuses on the evaluation of TTC methods that utilize underlying Chains-of-Thought (CoT). It supports evaluations across multiple LLMs on a diverse set of mathematical and commonsense reasoning datasets. The few-shot prompting and answer extraction processes are standardized across datasets, reducing both time and monetary overhead for researchers. Furthermore, we provide a cost modelling procedure that estimates both the token and dollar cost per query, facilitating equitable comparisons of prevalent TTC methods. We open-source FEval-TTC for public use at https://github.com/networkslab/feval_ttc .