ZipBench: Low-Cost Framework for Compressing Comprehensive Benchmarks of Large Language Models

Zhongzhan Huang, Junxin Li, Guoming Ling, Yupei Lin, Shanshan Zhong, Hefeng Wu


Abstract
Comprehensive benchmark suites are essential for improving large language models (LLMs), but many widely used benchmarks are redundant, making evaluation unnecessarily expensive. Although recent benchmark compression methods (BCMs) can mitigate this cost, many strong BCMs rely on large collections of per-sample evaluation results from numerous LLMs to identify representative samples. Building such collections is also expensive unless they are already public, making these methods difficult to extend to newly released benchmarks. To address this challenge, we present ZipBench, a simple and low-cost BCM with theoretical error and rank-consistency guarantees. ZipBench evaluates only a small set of anchor LLMs, synthesizes pseudo evaluation results to broaden coverage, learns compact sample representations, and selects a small yet representative subset. Building on it, we create ZipBench Zoo, a collection of compact versions of 100+ benchmarks spanning text, multimodal, and agent tasks. These benchmark proxies achieve mean absolute errors of 0.002–0.02 and average Spearman correlations of ~0.98 with the full benchmarks. Overall, ZipBench reduces the cost of both LLM evaluation and compact benchmark construction, lowering the barrier to broad LLM research for compute-constrained researchers. All data, code and checkpoints will be fully released.
Anthology ID:
2026.emnlp-main.1879
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
42839–42869
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1879/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhongzhan Huang, Junxin Li, Guoming Ling, Yupei Lin, Shanshan Zhong, and Hefeng Wu. 2026. ZipBench: Low-Cost Framework for Compressing Comprehensive Benchmarks of Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 42839–42869, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ZipBench: Low-Cost Framework for Compressing Comprehensive Benchmarks of Large Language Models (Huang et al., EMNLP 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.emnlp-main.1879.pdf