ProBench: Benchmarking Large Language Models in Competitive Programming

With reasoning language models such as OpenAI-o3 and DeepSeek-R1 emerging, large language models (LLMs) have entered a new phase of development. However, existing benchmarks for coding evaluation are gradually inadequate to assess the capability of advanced LLMs in code reasoning. To bridge the gap for high-level code reasoning assessment, we propose ProBench to benchmark LLMs in competitive programming, drawing inspiration from the International Collegiate Programming Contest. ProBench collects a comprehensive set of competitive programming problems from Codeforces, Luogu, and Nowcoder platforms during the period from July to December 2024, obtaining real test results through online submissions to ensure the fairness and accuracy of the evaluation. We establish a unified problem attribute system, including difficulty grading and algorithm tagging. With carefully collected and annotated data in ProBench, we systematically assess 9 latest LLMs in competitive programming across multiple dimensions, including thought chain analysis, error type diagnosis, and reasoning depth evaluation. Experimental results show that QwQ-32B-Preview achieves the best score of 20.93 followed by DeepSeek-V3 with a score of 16.38, suggesting that models trained with specialized reasoning tasks significantly outperform general-purpose models (even larger than reasoning-oriented models) in programming. Further analysis also reveals key areas for programming capability enhancement, e.g., algorithm adaptability and reasoning sufficiency, providing important insights for the future development of reasoning models.

Planning with Large Language Models for Conversational Agents

Controllability and proactivity are crucial properties of autonomous conversational agents (CAs). Controllability requires the CAs to follow the standard operating procedures (SOPs), such as verifying identity before activating credit cards. Proactivity requires the CAs to guide the conversation towards the goal during user uncooperation, such as persuasive dialogue. Existing research cannot be unified with controllability, proactivity, and low manual annotation. To bridge this gap, we propose a new framework for planning-based conversational agents (PCA) powered by large language models (LLMs), which only requires humans to define tasks and goals for the LLMs. Before conversation, LLM plans the core and necessary SOP for dialogue offline. During the conversation, LLM plans the best action path online referring to the SOP, and generates responses to achieve process controllability. Subsequently, we propose a semi-automatic dialogue data creation framework and curate a high-quality dialogue dataset (PCA-D). Meanwhile, we develop multiple variants and evaluation metrics for PCA, e.g., planning with Monte Carlo Tree Search (PCA-M), which searches for the optimal dialogue action while satisfying SOP constraints and achieving the proactive of the dialogue. Experiment results show that LLMs finetuned on PCA-D can significantly improve the performance and generalize to unseen domains. PCA-M outperforms other CoT and ToT baselines in terms of conversation controllability, proactivity, task success rate, and overall logical coherence, and is applicable in industry dialogue scenarios. The dataset and codes are available at XXXX.

M3KE: A Massive Multi-Level Multi-Subject Knowledge Evaluation Benchmark for Chinese Large Language Models

Large language models have recently made tremendous progress in a variety of aspects, e.g., cross-task generalization, instruction following. Comprehensively evaluating the capability of large language models in multiple tasks is of great importance. In this paper, we propose M3KE, a Massive Multi-Level Multi-Subject Knowledge Evaluation benchmark, which is developed to measure knowledge acquired by Chinese large language models by testing their multitask accuracy in zero- and few-shot settings. We have collected 20,477 questions from 71 tasks. Our selection covers all major levels of Chinese education system, ranging from the primary school to college, as well as a wide variety of subjects, including humanities, history, politics, law, education, psychology, science, technology, art and religion. All questions are multiple-choice questions with four options, hence guaranteeing a standardized and unified assessment process. We've assessed a number of state-of-the-art open-source Chinese large language models on the proposed benchmark. The size of these models varies from 335M to 130B parameters. Experiment results demonstrate that they perform significantly worse than GPT-3.5 that reaches an accuracy of ~ 48% on M3KE. The dataset is available at https://github.com/tjunlp-lab/M3KE.