Efficient Lifelong Model Evaluation in an Era of Rapid Progress

Standardized benchmarks drive progress in machine learning. However, with repeated testing, the risk of overfitting grows as algorithms over-exploit benchmark idiosyncrasies. In our work, we seek to mitigate this challenge by compiling ever-expanding large-scale benchmarks called Lifelong Benchmarks. These benchmarks introduce a major challenge: the high cost of evaluating a growing number of models across very large sample sets. To address this challenge, we introduce an efficient framework for model evaluation, Sort&Search (S&S), which reuses previously evaluated models by leveraging dynamic programming algorithms to selectively rank and sub-select test samples. To test our approach at scale, we create Lifelong-CIFAR10 and Lifelong-ImageNet, containing 1.69M and 1.98M test samples for classification. Extensive empirical evaluations across over 31,000 models demonstrate that S&S achieves highly-efficient approximate accuracy measurement, reducing compute cost from 180 GPU days to 5 GPU hours (about 1000x reduction) on a single A100 GPU, with low approximation error and memory cost of<100MB. Our work also highlights issues with current accuracy prediction metrics, suggesting a need to move towards sample-level evaluation metrics. We hope to guide future research by showing our method's bottleneck lies primarily in generalizing Sort beyond a single rank order and not in improving Search.