When benchmark inferences do not compose: Projectibility in AI evaluation

Abstract

An AI benchmark result rarely reaches a consequential claim in one step. Evaluators generalize it to further cases, interpret it as evidence of capability, extrapolate it to new tasks, transport it to another system or site, and combine it with assumptions about human review and downstream consequences. Validity-centred approaches require evidence for each claim. This paper makes explicit and operationalizes a problem those approaches leave to the analyst: warranted links don't automatically make a warranted chain. The target of one study may not be the source of the next; system, population, outcome, or conditions may change at the interface; and shared data or model lineage may make apparently independent support dependent. Projectibility concerns whether a bounded extension from observed to unobserved cases is warranted. Goodman supplies the problem of rival extensions; argument-based validity supplies an architecture for testing them. The contribution is an interface audit for distributed AI evidence: typed source and target descriptions, and a procedure separating endpoints that never meet from endpoints that meet while warrant fails to cross. A legal-research case shows how benchmark evidence and a deployment study can each be sound while remaining parallel. A known-truth demonstration shows why aggregate stability can erase distinctions a later projection requires. The resulting projectibility audit diagnoses unsupported joins in benchmark-to-use arguments.