Equation 27 · Why Cost and Latency Belong in the Evaluation Score, Not a Footnote
What does this equation mean?
Read the formula alongside the article passage below. Each part has a deeper page with its role in the equation, the supporting passage and nearby citations.
This equation gives an approximation: it relates the quantities while allowing an approximation. Read the equation part by part below; each part has a contextual explanation and a link to its mathematical background.
Read it piece by piece
Symbol C
C is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
Symbol k
k is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
Symbol barc
barc is a part of this expression. Its role is fixed by the surrounding article and by the operations shown in the formula.
How to interpret it
Its accuracy depends on the assumptions and range of use described in the article.
What the article says around this equation
Start with how an agent handles its own failures. Suppose a task is retried up to k times under two different execution policies: sequential retry, where each attempt waits for the previous one to finish before starting, and parallel sampling, where all k attempts run concurrently and the first success is taken. Cost is roughly indifferent to which policy was used — the compute consumed scales with the number of attempts made, C(k) k , regardless of whether they ran one after another or all at once. Latency is not indifferent at all:
Sources cited in the article section
- [8] Identifying and Mitigating Systemic Measurement Bias in Production LLM Inference Benchmarks ↗
- [10] Towards Reproducible LLM Evaluation: Quantifying Uncertainty in LLM Benchmark Scores ↗
These citations give research context. Read each source to check which claims it supports.
Return to Why Cost and Latency Belong in the Evaluation Score, Not a Footnote