EVALUATION CARDS: An Interpretive Layer for AI Evaluation Reporting
Abstract
AI evaluation results are produced at scale but reported inconsistently across leaderboards, model cards, benchmark papers, and company blogs. This fragmentation is borne at the level of interpretation: readers cannot reliably compare results across sources, identify what is missing from a given report, or trace an aggregate claim to the evidence behind it. Recent efforts address isolated components of this problem but leave three gaps unresolved: They cover only narrow slices of the evaluation lifecycle and do not compose into a single interpretable record. They specify static representations that do not differentiate between the questions technical and policy readers bring to the same evidence. And they remain proposals on paper, without the extraction infrastructure required for adoption at scale. We present EVALUATION CARDS, an operational reporting layer that composes benchmark metadata, evaluation run data, and model metadata into a unified record. We (1) derive a reporting schema from a structured literature review of 52 papers and 10 stakeholder interviews, (2) implement four interpretive signals (reproducibility, documentation completeness, provenance and risk, and score comparability), rendered through reader modes calibrated to research and policy audiences, and (3) provide a deployed monitoring tool that applies EVALUATION CARDS across 5,498 models, 635 benchmarks, and 101,843 results, surfacing systematic gaps in current reporting practice.