infereval

Inferentialist evaluation of LLMs: derive an implication frame from a language model's endorsement verdicts, then measure the model's agreement with an analyst-labeled benchmark via coverage and Cohen's / Fleiss' kappa. The agreement is evidence bearing on an inferential-mastery attribution — not a measurement of mastery itself (per the paper's Remark 8).

infereval is the executable companion to Note on Simonelli's Stop Sign Dialogue: An Implication-Space Instrument for Probing LLM Endorsement of Material Inferential Rules (Allen, 2026), which is maintained as a separate paper. The framework formalizes the procedure β → η → (cov, κ_C, κ_F, κ_F*) for any analyst-supplied benchmark.

Status

Beta (0.x, pre-1.0). The public Python API and CLI surface may shift between minor releases until 1.0. Methodology defaults are locked, and the JSON schemas are versioned independently (schema_version: "1.0") and promised stable from 1.0 onward regardless of the framework version. See the CHANGELOG for the current release.

Documentation

The docs site at https://www.bradleypallen.org/infereval/ covers a Concepts page (methodology mental model), Authoring benchmarks, Interpreting metrics (κ_C / κ_F / κ_F*, test-retest κ, decompositions, subsampling CIs, sensitivity sweeps), Providers (Anthropic seed handling, DeepSeek reasoning-token budgets, OpenRouter attribution), and Construct validity of the instrument — the R1–R22 requirements catalogue and end-to-end workflow in one place. Four executable tutorial notebooks (quickstart, authoring, paraphrase-axis triangulation, pulmonology visualization). Plus an auto-generated API reference, an Architecture dataflow diagram, a Glossary of paper symbols, and a JSON-schema reference.

Findings

A 13-model × 3-paraphrase-variant cross-family sweep against the stop-sign benchmark (2026-06-09) is committed at experiments/results/stop_sign_2026-06-09.md. Headline: under the paper-aligned δ(ra), 12 of 13 frontier LLMs across six families reproduce Simonelli's analyst row exactly (κ_C = +1.000) — a thirteen-model independent replication of the paper's empirical anchor under fresh v0.15.2 captures. The perceptual variant is the cleavage axis. A companion 6-model pulmonary edema sweep (n=30 items) at experiments/results/pulmonology_2026-06-09.md characterizes within-day and day-out R22 reliability; the deepseek-v4-pro cell exhibits monotone κ decay across three time-scales (0.867 → 0.792 → 0.729) — the clearest published example of detectable across-update model drift the framework has produced.

Install

pip install infereval

Provider SDKs are optional extras (the framework runs without them — use the mock or replay providers):

pip install 'infereval[anthropic]'   # Anthropic Claude
pip install 'infereval[openai]'      # OpenAI + OpenRouter (OpenAI-API-compatible)
pip install 'infereval[all]'

From source (editable):

git clone https://github.com/bradleypallen/infereval
cd infereval
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install -e '.[dev]'

60-second quickstart

Inspect the bundled stop-sign benchmark (Example 1 of the paper), then run an evaluation against the deterministic replay fixture — no API key needed:

# 1. Look at the benchmark.
infereval describe examples/stop_sign/benchmark.json

# 2. Validate it against the JSON schema.
infereval validate examples/stop_sign/benchmark.json

# 3. Run a deterministic evaluation against the committed replay fixture.
infereval evaluate examples/stop_sign/benchmark.json \
    --replay-from tests/fixtures/stop_sign_replay.jsonl \
    --output /tmp/eta.json \
    --n-samples 5 \
    --log /tmp/run.jsonl

# 4. Compute metrics.
infereval metrics /tmp/eta.json --benchmark examples/stop_sign/benchmark.json

To run against a real model, replace step 3 with:

export ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=...
infereval evaluate examples/stop_sign/benchmark.json \
    --provider anthropic --model claude-haiku-4-5-20251001 \
    --output /tmp/eta.json --n-samples 5 --log /tmp/run.jsonl

The JSONL run log under /tmp/run.jsonl records one event per provider call (prompt hash, raw response, parsed verdict, usage, timing) so the evaluation is auditable end to end.

For the R22 test-retest discipline, infereval retest --auto --benchmark <b> --provider X --model Y [--interval-s N] [--save-etas DIR] (v0.11.0+) collapses the four-step manual workflow (evaluate, evaluate again, retest, optionally --claims) into one CLI call — runs the same evaluation twice with an optional inter-capture sleep and emits the standard RetestResult directly. v0.12.0+ accepts --interval-s multiple times for cumulative drift-since-baseline analysis in one orchestrated call. v0.13.0+ surfaces test-retest κ as a co-equal ### Reliability (R22) subhead in infereval report §2 alongside ### Agreement, and auto-detects single vs multi-interval retest shape (multi-interval renders a per-interval table with a worst-case overall verdict). v0.14.0+ adds the staged-composition pattern: --baseline-from <eta-path> runs one fresh capture against a saved baseline and --append-to <multi.json> appends a new pair to an existing multi-result — both compute interval_s from actual elapsed wall clock, so day-out / week-out R22 evidence can ship as incremental commits without the CLI process needing to stay alive for the elapsed window. See the stop-sign R22 capture for the worked end-to-end demo.

What this is and isn't

This is: a research tool that formalizes Simonelli's stop-sign dialogue into a repeatable evaluation procedure. Given (i) a bearer set, (ii) expression and context-construction functions, (iii) a benchmark of implications labeled by one or more analysts, the framework drives an LLM through endorsement-probing for each implication and reports the resulting agreement with analyst practice along three axes:

• Coverage — how often the model takes a substantive position (cov(η)).
• Cohen's kappa — agreement against a chosen reference (analyst consensus c_i or a single analyst v_{:,j}).
• Fleiss' kappa — agreement with the model treated as the (m+1)th annotator, alongside the inter-analyst baseline κ_F*(β) (Remark 4 of the paper).

Each metric can be decomposed by tag or by RSR target.

This is not: a factuality benchmark, a leaderboard, or an answer to whether LLMs are sapient. The methodology is carving-relative: results depend on the analyst-supplied bearer carving, context construction, and benchmark. The framework provides the machinery; the analyst supplies the practice the machinery is comparing against. See the Discussion in the paper for what carving-relativity buys and costs.

API surface

from infereval import (
    Verdict, Bearer, Implication,           # core data types
    DerivedFrame,                            # ⟨B, I_M⟩ per Definition 3
)
from infereval.benchmark import Benchmark
from infereval.evaluation import Evaluation, evaluate, EndorsementConfig, ProviderParams
from infereval.providers import get_provider
from infereval.metrics import MetricsReport

bench = Benchmark.load("examples/stop_sign/benchmark.json")
provider = get_provider("anthropic", "claude-haiku-4-5-20251001")
eta = evaluate(bench, provider,
               config=EndorsementConfig(n_samples=5),
               params=ProviderParams(temperature=1.0),
               log_path="/tmp/run.jsonl")
report = MetricsReport(eta=eta, benchmark=bench)
print(report.to_dict())

Locked methodology defaults

These are framework defaults, overridable per evaluation:

See CLAUDE.md and the paper for the full list and the rationale behind each choice.

Development

pip install -e '.[dev]'
pytest                                # all unit + replay tests
pytest -m live                        # opt-in live provider tests (requires API keys)
mypy src/infereval
ruff check src tests

Live provider tests require RUN_LIVE_PROVIDER_TESTS=1 and the relevant API key in the environment. They are skipped by default.

Citation

@unpublished{allen2026inferential,
  author = {Allen, Bradley P.},
  title  = {Note on {S}imonelli's Stop Sign Dialogue: An Implication-Space Instrument for Probing {LLM} Endorsement of Material Inferential Rules},
  year   = {2026},
  note   = {University of Amsterdam}
}

License

MIT — see LICENSE.