Classifier candidate benchmark
When to use
Evaluating models for a decision, including reproductions of commercial ones.
Procedure
- Run each candidate through the identical harness and save raw answers, not just scores.
- Report per candidate: gates passed or failed, utility at the operating point, calibration, determinism across repeats, latency, and marginal cost.
- Adopt the canonical serving path the author specifies before judging a candidate; an adapted path is a different model.
- Record byte-identical determinism checks across runs.
- Publish the rejects with their reason. A benchmark that only reports a winner is not a benchmark.
Decision rules
- Non-determinism disqualifies a candidate where reproducible routing is required.
- Latency is a gate, not a footnote. A qualifying model at eight seconds per input against a 100-millisecond budget is a design problem, not a pass.
- Hosted commercial references are useful as calibration and unacceptable as a hard dependency when spend or retention is a constraint.
- Re-run after any upstream correction, and report whether the verdict moved.
Pitfalls
- Judging a model on a non-canonical serving path and blaming the model.
- Reporting only the winner.
- Ignoring marginal cost per call in a high-volume pre-filter.
Done
Every candidate has a dated verdict with gates, utility, calibration, determinism, latency and cost — and the rejects are documented as thoroughly as the winner.


