HELM
Stanford's framework for reproducible, transparent benchmark evaluation of language models.
About
Benchmark sprawl is what HELM was built to tame: Stanford CRFM's Holistic Evaluation of Language Models wraps datasets like MMLU-Pro, GPQA, IFEval, and WildBench into standardized scenarios, runs them against any model behind a unified adapter layer, and scores results on metrics beyond accuracy, including calibration, robustness, bias, toxicity, and efficiency. The same pipeline powers the public HELM Capabilities and HELM Safety leaderboards plus specialized suites such as VHELM for vision-language models and MedHELM for clinical tasks, and every prompt and completion behind a leaderboard number can be inspected in the web UI, which is the project's transparency argument. The framework installs as the crfm-helm package from PyPI under Apache 2.0, evaluates hosted APIs and local Hugging Face models alike, and writes results as JSON its visualizer renders. The project moved to maintenance mode in June 2026 and still accepts fixes; it remains the citation standard for holistic LLM evaluation, with the original 2022 paper among the most cited in the evaluation literature.
Should you use HELM?
Pick it when
Pick HELM when you need holistic, citable model comparisons that score calibration, robustness, bias, and toxicity alongside accuracy, with every prompt and completion inspectable, for a report or research paper.
Look elsewhere when
Skip it for new day-to-day benchmarking pipelines: the project entered maintenance mode in June 2026. LightEval is easier to set up, and lm-evaluation-harness offers the most widely reused prompt formats.
Alternatives to HELM
- LM Evaluation Harness
The standard behind the Open LLM Leaderboard with YAML tasks; centers on accuracy benchmarks rather than HELM's multi-metric view.
- LightEval
Quicker setup and 1,000+ built-in tasks across vLLM, TGI, or hosted APIs; lacks HELM's holistic multi-metric methodology and public leaderboards.
- Inspect AI
Better for agentic and safety evals where models use tools, with 200+ prebuilt tasks; not built around multi-metric leaderboards.
- OpenCompass
Built for distributed sweeps across 70+ datasets and Chinese providers; pick it for scale, HELM for transparency into each completion.
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Details
- Category
- AI Observability & Evaluation
- Price
- Free
- Platform
- Local/Desktop
- Difficulty
- Intermediate (3/5)
- License
- Apache-2.0
- Added
- Aug 24, 2026