We study whether benchmarks reliably guide model selection as developers adapt to evaluation feedback across multiple criteria.
We find that the worst-case test-set size needed to estimate the best score among $k$ adaptively chosen models, under any convex combination of the criteria, grows exponentially with the number of criteria, reaching the $Θ(\sqrt{k})$ cost of answering $k$ adaptive statistical queries with only $O(\log k)$ criteria, at fixed accuracy and confidence.
In attacks on multi-task large language model benchmarks with five to ten criteria, feedback restricted to nondominated task profiles produces large reused-to-held-out score gaps and frequent false winners.
These results challenge a prominent explanation for prior observed reliable benchmark reuse---that developers mainly respond to convincing improvements over the current best---in rich-feedback settings, while leaving open how often ordinary model development encounters this vulnerability.