Efficient MedHELM

This tutorial shows how to add your model to the MedHELM leaderboard at a fraction of the cost of a full run, using the technique from IBM Research described in Efficient Benchmarking (of Language Models) (Perlitz et al., 2023).

The rank-location tradeoffs in the table below were measured on the original HELM Classic benchmark suite. MedHELM uses the same --max-eval-instances subsampling approach; treat the rank CI numbers as approximate guidance rather than MedHELM-specific calibration.

Prerequisites

• MedHELM installed (installation guide)
• Google Cloud CLI (gcloud) for downloading public leaderboard results
• API credentials or local deployments configured for your model (adding new models)

Download MedHELM leaderboard results

To compare your model against models on the official leaderboard, download the public MedHELM release tree from Google Cloud Storage:

export OUTPUT_PATH="./benchmark_output"
export GCS_BENCHMARK_OUTPUT_PATH="gs://crfm-helm-public/medhelm/benchmark_output"
export RELEASE=v2.0.0

mkdir -p "$OUTPUT_PATH"

# Optional: check download size first
# gcloud storage du -sr "$GCS_BENCHMARK_OUTPUT_PATH"

gcloud storage rsync -r "$GCS_BENCHMARK_OUTPUT_PATH" "$OUTPUT_PATH"

After the download, confirm that release metadata exists, for example benchmark_output/releases/v2.0.0/summary.json. Pick the RELEASE value from the version selector on leaderboard.medhelm.org.

Note: MedHELM does not publish a lightweight run_stats.zip archive. Leaderboard results are distributed via the GCS path above. See Viewing and Reproducing Leaderboard Results for more detail.

Optional: smaller download

If you only need aggregated metrics (not per-instance request/response files), you can sync from an existing local copy while excluding large artifacts. See LEADERBOARD_EXPORT.md in the repository.

Run efficient MedHELM

According to Efficient Benchmarking (of Language Models), running with a fraction of evaluation instances per scenario can still yield a reliable estimate of a full run. The authors report the following tradeoffs¹:

Choose your tradeoff, then set your model and evaluation depth:

export EXAMPLES_PER_SCENARIO=10
export MODEL=openai/gpt2
export MODEL_DEPLOYMENT=huggingface/gpt2
export SCHEMA_PATH=src/helm/benchmark/static/schema_medhelm.yaml

run_entries_medhelm_public.conf lists the models and Stanford Healthcare deployments used on the public leaderboard. To evaluate your model on the same scenarios, copy the config and replace model= / model_deployment= in each entry:

cp src/helm/benchmark/presentation/run_entries_medhelm_public.conf run_entries_my_model.conf
# Edit run_entries_my_model.conf: set your MODEL and MODEL_DEPLOYMENT on every entry.

For a quick smoke test on a few public scenarios before running the full public config:

medhelm-run \
  --run-entries "pubmed_qa:model=$MODEL,model_deployment=$MODEL_DEPLOYMENT" \
                "medcalc_bench:model=$MODEL,model_deployment=$MODEL_DEPLOYMENT" \
  --suite "$RELEASE" \
  --output-path "$OUTPUT_PATH" \
  --max-eval-instances "$EXAMPLES_PER_SCENARIO" \
  --num-train-trials 1 \
  --cache-instances \
  --skip-completed-runs

To run the full public benchmark suite with subsampled instances:

medhelm-run \
  --conf-paths run_entries_my_model.conf \
  --suite "$RELEASE" \
  --output-path "$OUTPUT_PATH" \
  --max-eval-instances "$EXAMPLES_PER_SCENARIO" \
  --num-train-trials 1 \
  --cache-instances \
  --skip-completed-runs \
  --priority 2

Use the same --suite value as the release you downloaded (for example v2.0.0) so your runs appear alongside existing leaderboard results. --skip-completed-runs avoids re-running models that are already present under benchmark_output/runs/$RELEASE/.

The first run may take a while because datasets are downloaded and cached regardless of how many instances you evaluate.

Summarize and serve your results

Aggregate results with the MedHELM schema:

helm-summarize --schema "$SCHEMA_PATH" --suite "$RELEASE" -o "$OUTPUT_PATH"

Launch the local leaderboard UI with the official release:

helm-server --release "$RELEASE" --output-path "$OUTPUT_PATH"

Open http://localhost:8000 to see your model next to the downloaded leaderboard models.

For a full reproduction (all instances, gated/private benchmarks), see Reproducing Leaderboards.

References

Perlitz, Y., Bandel, E., Gera, A., Arviv, O., Ein-Dor, L., Shnarch, E., Slonim, N., Shmueli-Scheuer, M. and Choshen, L., 2023. Efficient Benchmarking (of Language Models). arXiv preprint arXiv:2308.11696.