Lighteval

Lighteval is an evaluation toolkit for testing large language models across multiple backends.

Lighteval is an open-source evaluation toolkit created by Hugging Face's Leaderboard and Evals Team. It allows users to assess large language models across multiple backends, whether models are served remotely or loaded directly into memory. The platform supports over one thousand evaluation tasks spanning knowledge, math, coding, chat evaluation, multilingual benchmarks, and core language understanding. Users can browse existing tasks and metrics or create custom tasks and metrics for specific needs. It saves detailed, sample-by-sample results for debugging and performance analysis.

Lighteval at a glance

Best for: Software engineer, Researcher
Runs on: macOS, Linux, CLI, open source
Pricing: Free
Released: January 2024
Category: AI research tool
Website: github.com/huggingface/lighteval

Key features

Evaluate models across multiple backends
Support for 1000+ evaluation tasks and benchmarks
Create custom tasks and metrics
Save detailed sample-by-sample results
Push results to the Hugging Face Hub
Run evaluations using CLI entry points

Use it for

Evaluating large language models on standard benchmarks
Testing custom tasks and proprietary metrics
Debugging model performance with sample-by-sample results
Running distributed model evaluations on GPUs

Alternatives to Lighteval

VLMEvalKit — Evaluate large vision-language models across numerous benchmarks with a single command.
DeepEval — Provides over fifty research-backed metrics and pytest-native execution.
EvalScope — It combines model capability benchmarks with inference performance testing in one tool.
LightLLM — It delivers high-speed inference and serving performance for large language models.
LMMs-Eval — Provides open research and tooling for multimodal model evaluation and benchmarks.
OpenVLHarness — Lifts six multimodal model backbones by 9.7 to 12.6 points across 22 benchmarks.
vLLM — Maximizes throughput with PagedAttention and continuous batching.
MTEB — Evaluates embedding models across over 1000 tasks and 1000 languages.
WebLLM — Runs high-performance language models directly inside web browsers.
Hugging Face — Home of open-source AI models and the Transformers library
StreamEval — A specialized benchmark for interactive streaming video generation models.
llmware — Build private, local RAG pipelines with 300+ prepackaged models and integrated document parsing.

All Lighteval alternatives