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Defend an inference benchmark with quality gates and cost evidence

Turn paired request records into an auditable cost, latency and useful-throughput comparison. Reject confounded runs and candidates that miss the quality rule.

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What makes an inference benchmark defensible?

Hold the workload and model identity fixed, retain failures, repeat matched configurations and declare acceptance before looking at results. Compare cost per acceptable answer with latency and useful throughput. A Pareto frontier can be empty when every candidate misses the acceptance rule. The supplied report computes a measured-window cost from explicit assumptions, not a production total cost of ownership.

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What you build
A reproducible comparison, an eligible Pareto frontier and a written decision with a reversal condition.
Environment
CPU · Python 3.12 · real serving records required for performance conclusions
Plan your session
2–3 hours after collecting paired runs. A planning estimate, not measured runtime.
Before you begin
Keep at least three matched A/B blocks from the serving experiment. Declare the acceptance rule and record the source and scope of hourly cost inputs before comparing candidates.
Report checks executed · local GPU evidence available. Report arithmetic and rejected-input behavior tested with fixtures. The tuning branch supplies local single-engine GPU evidence. Cross-engine comparisons, cloud prices and production capacity are not measured here.
  1. 01Verify identity

    Check model settings, workload hashes, paired blocks and raw outcomes.

  2. 02Apply acceptance

    Compute useful-answer cost and retain failed quality candidates.

  3. 03Defend a decision

    Compare eligible tradeoffs and state what evidence would reverse the choice.

Follow the changing state through the project. Each boundary has a check in the walkthrough.

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Start with Stream vLLM responses with Python and detect incomplete answers (Free to read).

Primary sources

Checked . Source review and execution checks are described separately above.