Revisiting LLM Evaluation through Mechanism Interpretability: a New Metric and Model Utility Law

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become indispensable across academia, industry, and daily applications, yet current evaluation methods struggle to keep pace with their rapid development. In this paper, we analyze the core limitations of traditional evaluation pipelines and propose a novel metric, the Model Utilization Index (MUI), which introduces mechanism interpretability techniques to complement traditional performance metrics. MUI quantifies the extent to which a model leverages its capabilities to complete tasks. The core idea is that to assess an LLM's overall ability, we must evaluate not only its task performance but also the effort expended to achieve the outcome. Our extensive experiments reveal an inverse relationship between MUI and performance, from which we deduce a common trend observed in popular LLMs, which we term the Utility Law. Based on this, we derive four corollaries that address key challenges, including training judgement, the issue of data contamination, fairness in model comparison, and data diversity. We hope that our survey, novel metric, and utility law will foster mutual advancement in both evaluation and mechanism interpretability. Our code can be found at https://github.com/ALEX-nlp/MUI-Eva.

SeaExam and SeaBench: Benchmarking LLMs with Local Multilingual Questions in Southeast Asia

This study introduces two novel benchmarks, SeaExam and SeaBench, designed to evaluate the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) in Southeast Asian (SEA) application scenarios. Unlike existing multilingual datasets primarily derived from English translations, these benchmarks are constructed based on real-world scenarios from SEA regions. SeaExam draws from regional educational exams to form a comprehensive dataset that encompasses subjects such as local history and literature. In contrast, SeaBench is crafted around multi-turn, open-ended tasks that reflect daily interactions within SEA communities. Our evaluations demonstrate that SeaExam and SeaBench more effectively discern LLM performance on SEA language tasks compared to their translated benchmarks. This highlights the importance of using real-world queries to assess the multilingual capabilities of LLMs.

EvoWiki: Evaluating LLMs on Evolving Knowledge

Knowledge utilization is a critical aspect of LLMs, and understanding how they adapt to evolving knowledge is essential for their effective deployment. However, existing benchmarks are predominantly static, failing to capture the evolving nature of LLMs and knowledge, leading to inaccuracies and vulnerabilities such as contamination. In this paper, we introduce EvoWiki, an evolving dataset designed to reflect knowledge evolution by categorizing information into stable, evolved, and uncharted states. EvoWiki is fully auto-updatable, enabling precise evaluation of continuously changing knowledge and newly released LLMs. Through experiments with Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) and Contunual Learning (CL), we evaluate how effectively LLMs adapt to evolving knowledge. Our results indicate that current models often struggle with evolved knowledge, frequently providing outdated or incorrect responses. Moreover, the dataset highlights a synergistic effect between RAG and CL, demonstrating their potential to better adapt to evolving knowledge. EvoWiki provides a robust benchmark for advancing future research on the knowledge evolution capabilities of large language models.

Diagnosing and Remedying Knowledge Deficiencies in LLMs via Label-free Curricular Meaningful Learning

Large Language Models (LLMs) are versatile and demonstrate impressive generalization ability by mining and learning information from extensive unlabeled text. However, they still exhibit reasoning mistakes, often stemming from knowledge deficiencies, which can affect their trustworthiness and reliability. Although users can provide diverse and comprehensive queries, obtaining sufficient and effective feedback is demanding. Furthermore, evaluating LLMs comprehensively with limited labeled samples is difficult. This makes it a challenge to diagnose and remedy the deficiencies of LLMs through rich label-free user queries. To tackle this challenge, we propose a label-free curricular meaningful learning framework (LaMer). LaMer first employs relative entropy to automatically diagnose and quantify the knowledge deficiencies of LLMs in a label-free setting. Next, to remedy the diagnosed knowledge deficiencies, we apply curricular meaningful learning: first, we adopt meaningful learning to adaptively synthesize augmentation data according to the severity of the deficiencies, and then design a curricular deficiency remedy strategy to remedy the knowledge deficiencies of LLMs progressively. Experiments show that LaMer efficiently and effectively diagnoses and remedies knowledge deficiencies in LLMs, improving various LLMs across seven out-of-distribution (OOD) reasoning and language understanding benchmarks, achieving comparable results to baselines with just 40\% training data. LaMer even surpasses methods that rely on labeled datasets for deficiency diagnosis. In application, our label-free method can offer an effective knowledge deficiency diagnostic tool for efficient LLM development.

LLMs-as-Instructors: Learning from Errors Toward Automating Model Improvement

This paper introduces the innovative "LLMs-as-Instructors" framework, which leverages the advanced Large Language Models (LLMs) to autonomously enhance the training of smaller target models. Inspired by the theory of "Learning from Errors", this framework employs an instructor LLM to meticulously analyze the specific errors within a target model, facilitating targeted and efficient training cycles. Within this framework, we implement two strategies: "Learning from Error," which focuses solely on incorrect responses to tailor training data, and "Learning from Error by Contrast", which uses contrastive learning to analyze both correct and incorrect responses for a deeper understanding of errors. Our empirical studies, conducted with several open-source models, demonstrate significant improvements across multiple benchmarks, including mathematical reasoning, coding abilities, and factual knowledge. Notably, the refined Llama-3-8b-Instruction has outperformed ChatGPT, illustrating the effectiveness of our approach. By leveraging the strengths of both strategies, we have attained a more balanced performance improvement on both in-domain and out-of-domain benchmarks. Our code can be found at https://yingjiahao14.github.io/LLMs-as-Instructors-pages/.

QRMeM: Unleash the Length Limitation through Question then Reflection Memory Mechanism

While large language models (LLMs) have made notable advancements in natural language processing, they continue to struggle with processing extensive text. Memory mechanism offers a flexible solution for managing long contexts, utilizing techniques such as compression, summarization, and structuring to facilitate nuanced and efficient handling of large volumes of text. However, existing techniques face challenges with static knowledge integration, leading to insufficient adaptation to task-specific needs and missing multi-segmentation relationships, which hinders the dynamic reorganization and logical combination of relevant segments during the response process. To address these issues, we introduce a novel strategy, Question then Reflection Memory Mechanism (QRMeM), incorporating a dual-structured memory pool. This pool synergizes static textual content with structured graph guidance, fostering a reflective trial-and-error approach for navigating and identifying relevant segments. Our evaluation across multiple-choice questions (MCQ) and multi-document question answering (Multi-doc QA) benchmarks showcases QRMeM enhanced performance compared to existing approaches.

A + B: A General Generator-Reader Framework for Optimizing LLMs to Unleash Synergy Potential

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is an effective solution to supplement necessary knowledge to large language models (LLMs). Targeting its bottleneck of retriever performance, "generate-then-read" pipeline is proposed to replace the retrieval stage with generation from the LLM itself. Although promising, this research direction is underexplored and still cannot work in the scenario when source knowledge is given. In this paper, we formalize a general "A + B" framework with varying combinations of foundation models and types for systematic investigation. We explore the efficacy of the base and chat versions of LLMs and found their different functionalities suitable for generator A and reader B, respectively. Their combinations consistently outperform single models, especially in complex scenarios. Furthermore, we extend the application of the "A + B" framework to scenarios involving source documents through continuous learning, enabling the direct integration of external knowledge into LLMs. This approach not only facilitates effective acquisition of new knowledge but also addresses the challenges of safety and helpfulness post-adaptation. The paper underscores the versatility of the "A + B" framework, demonstrating its potential to enhance the practical application of LLMs across various domains.

Have Seen Me Before? Automating Dataset Updates Towards Reliable and Timely Evaluation

Due to the expanding capabilities and pre-training data, Large Language Models (LLMs) are facing increasingly serious evaluation challenges. On one hand, the data leakage issue cause over-estimation on existing benchmarks. On the other hand, periodically curating datasets manually is costly. In this paper, we propose to automate dataset updates for reliable and timely evaluation. The basic idea is to generate unseen and high-quality testing samples based on existing ones to mitigate leakage issues. In specific, we propose two strategies with systematically verification. First, the mimicking strategy employs LLMs to create new samples resembling existing ones, to the maximum extent preserving the stylistic of the original dataset. Our experiments demonstrate its evaluation stability across multiple instantiations and its effectiveness in dealing with data leakage issues in most cases. Second, for the cases that mimicking dataset works poorly, we design an extending strategy that adjusts the difficulty of the generated samples according to varying cognitive levels. This not only makes our evaluation more systematic, but also, with a balanced difficulty, even discern model capabilities better at fine-grained levels.

Intuitive or Dependent? Investigating LLMs' Robustness to Conflicting Prompts

This paper explores the robustness of LLMs' preference to their internal memory or the given prompt, which may contain contrasting information in real-world applications due to noise or task settings. To this end, we establish a quantitative benchmarking framework and conduct the role playing intervention to control LLMs' preference. In specific, we define two types of robustness, factual robustness targeting the ability to identify the correct fact from prompts or memory, and decision style to categorize LLMs' behavior in making consistent choices -- assuming there is no definitive "right" answer -- intuitive, dependent, or rational based on cognitive theory. Our findings, derived from extensive experiments on seven open-source and closed-source LLMs, reveal that these models are highly susceptible to misleading prompts, especially for instructing commonsense knowledge. While detailed instructions can mitigate the selection of misleading answers, they also increase the incidence of invalid responses. After Unraveling the preference, we intervene different sized LLMs through specific style of role instruction, showing their varying upper bound of robustness and adaptivity.

Benchmarking Foundation Models with Language-Model-as-an-Examiner

Numerous benchmarks have been established to assess the performance of foundation models on open-ended question answering, which serves as a comprehensive test of a model's ability to understand and generate language in a manner similar to humans. Most of these works focus on proposing new datasets, however, we see two main issues within previous benchmarking pipelines, namely testing leakage and evaluation automation. In this paper, we propose a novel benchmarking framework, Language-Model-as-an-Examiner, where the LM serves as a knowledgeable examiner that formulates questions based on its knowledge and evaluates responses in a reference-free manner. Our framework allows for effortless extensibility as various LMs can be adopted as the examiner, and the questions can be constantly updated given more diverse trigger topics. For a more comprehensive and equitable evaluation, we devise three strategies: (1) We instruct the LM examiner to generate questions across a multitude of domains to probe for a broad acquisition, and raise follow-up questions to engage in a more in-depth assessment. (2) Upon evaluation, the examiner combines both scoring and ranking measurements, providing a reliable result as it aligns closely with human annotations. (3) We additionally propose a decentralized Peer-examination method to address the biases in a single examiner. Our data and benchmarking results are available at: https://lmexam.com.