Encyclopedia Evalica / Evaluation / Failure mode

Failure mode
/'fay.lyer mohd/A specific, recurring pattern of incorrect or undesired output. Identifying failure modes is the starting point for targeted improvement. (noun)
“The main failure mode is confidently answering without citing the retrieved docs.”
Related Evaluation terms
- Absolute scoring •
- Agent •
- AI eval •
- Alignment •
- Annotation schema •
- Baseline •
- Baseline experiment •
- Benchmark •
- Calibration •
- CI/CD integration •
- Coherence •
- Confidence interval •
- Eval harness •
- Eval leakage •
- Experiment •
- Factuality •
- Faithfulness •
- Feedback signal •
- Groundedness •
- Hallucination •
- Inter-annotator agreement (IAA) •
- LLM-as-a-judge •
- Loop •
- Model comparison •
- Multimodal •
- Non-determinism •
- Offline evaluation •
- Pairwise evaluation •
- Pass@k •
- Playground •
- Quality gate •
- RAG (retrieval-augmented generation) •
- RAG evaluation •
- Reference-based scoring •
- Reference-free scoring •
- Regression testing •
- Release criteria •
- Remote evaluation •
- Rubric •
- Safety •
- Score distribution •
- Scorer •
- Semantic failure •
- Signal-to-noise ratio •
- Task (eval task) •
- Toxicity score
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