Clotho: Measuring Task-Specific Pre-Generation Test Adequacy for LLM Inputs

Abstract

Software increasingly relies on the emergent capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs), from natural language understanding to program analysis and generation. Yet testing them on specific tasks remains difficult and costly: many prompts lack ground truths, forcing reliance on human judgments, while existing test adequacy measures typically rely on output uncertainty and thus are only available after full inference. A key challenge is to assess how useful a test input is in a way that reflects the demands of the task, ideally before even generating any output. We introduce Clotho, a task-specific, pre-generation test adequacy measure that estimates input difficulty directly from LLM hidden states. Given a large pool of unlabelled inputs for a specific task, Clotho uses a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM) to adaptively sample the most informative cases for human labelling. Based on this reference set the GMM can then rank unseen inputs by their likelihood of failure. In our empirical evaluation across eight benchmark tasks and three open-weight LLMs, Clotho can predict failures with a ROC-AUC of 0.716, after labelling reference sets that are on average only 5.4% of inputs. It does so without generating any outputs, thereby significantly reducing LLM execution costs compared to output-based uncertainty or confidence measures. Comparison of Clotho and these post-generation adequacy measures shows that the two approaches complement each other. Crucially, we show that adequacy scores learnt from open-weight LLMs transfer effectively to proprietary models, extending the applicability of the approach. When prioritising test inputs for proprietary models, Clotho increases the average number of failing inputs from 18.7 to 42.5 out of 100, compared to random prioritisation.