Cited by 4,254Topic ModelingNatural Language Processing TechniquesMultimodal Machine Learning Applications

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 374 of the 374 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; 171 of the 282 sources its claims cite were checked for support.

A Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Models

Open access

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are gaining increasing popularity in both academia and industry, owing to their unprecedented performance in various applications. As LLMs continue to play a vital role in both research and daily use, their evaluation becomes increasingly critical, not only at the task level, but also at the society level for better understanding of their potential risks. Over the past years, significant efforts have been made to examine LLMs from various perspectives. This paper presents a comprehensive review of these evaluation methods for LLMs, focusing on three key dimensions: what to evaluate , where to evaluate , and how to evaluate . Firstly, we provide an overview from the perspective of evaluation tasks, encompassing general natural language processing tasks, reasoning, medical usage, ethics, education, natural and social sciences, agent applications, and other areas. Secondly, we answer the ‘where’ and ‘how’ questions by diving into the evaluation methods and benchmarks, which serve as crucial components in assessing the performance of LLMs. Then, we summarize the success and failure cases of LLMs in different tasks. Finally, we shed light on several future challenges that lie ahead in LLMs evaluation. Our aim is to offer invaluable insights to researchers in the realm of LLMs evaluation, thereby aiding the development of more proficient LLMs. Our key point is that evaluation should be treated as an essential discipline to better assist the development of LLMs. We consistently maintain the related open-source materials at: https://github.com/MLGroupJLU/LLM-eval-survey

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

This survey reviews evaluation of large language models along three dimensions: what to evaluate, where to evaluate, and how to evaluate. It argues that evaluation should be treated as an essential discipline and summarizes LLM success/failure cases, benchmarks, metrics, and future challenges.

Key findings

  • The survey finds no evidence that one evaluation protocol or benchmark is the most useful or successful; different benchmarks have different characteristics and focuses, and no single model performs best across all tasks.
  • LLMs succeed at text generation, language understanding tasks such as sentiment analysis and text classification, arithmetic and logical reasoning, temporal reasoning, machine translation, text generation, and question answering. They fail or struggle with NLI, event semantic similarity, basic phrase evaluation, abstract reasoning, complex contexts, non-Latin and low-resource languages, visual modality, toxic/biased outputs, credibility/hallucination, real-time information, and adversarial prompts.
  • The paper compiles 46 popular benchmarks and categorizes them into general language tasks, specific downstream tasks, and multi-modal tasks. It summarizes automatic evaluation metrics including accuracy (Exact Match, F1, ROUGE), calibration (Expected Calibration Error, AUC), fairness (Demographic Parity Difference, Equalized Odds Difference), and robustness (Attack Success Rate, Performance Drop Rate), plus human evaluation criteria: accuracy, relevance, fluency, transparency, safety, and human alignment.
  • Reported examples include GPT-4 and BingChat answering more than 80% of open questions correctly but still with a gap of over 15% to complete accuracy; GPT-4 scoring 117 on an emotional quotient test, surpassing 89% of human participants; GPT-4 achieving 76.4% versus GPT-3.5’s 46.8% in surgical clinical information; role-playing increasing generated toxicity up to 6x; and ChatGPT answering 83% at recognition level, 62% at comprehension, 27% at application, and 10% at highest cognitive complexity.

Methods

  • Design: a comprehensive literature survey of LLM evaluation, organized around “what to evaluate,” “where to evaluate,” and “how to evaluate,” covering tasks, datasets/benchmarks, and evaluation protocols.
  • Data or sample: synthesizes existing evaluation studies across NLP, robustness/ethics/biases/trustworthiness, social science, natural science and engineering, medical applications, agent applications, and other applications; compiles 46 popular benchmarks in Table 7 and maintains related open-source materials.
  • Main analysis: qualitative synthesis and tabulation of reported results, metrics, benchmarks, and protocols; the paper does not conduct new experiments.

Limitations

  • Stated: the authors may miss new papers or benchmarks because LLM evaluation is continuously developing; LLMs may become stronger and some described limitations may be mitigated, while new limitations may arise; conclusions depend on specific datasets; and there is no evidence that one evaluation protocol or benchmark is most useful.
  • Stated: the paper’s categorization is only one possible way to classify evaluation works, and several NLP areas intersect.
  • Evident from text: as a survey, it relies on results reported by cited papers rather than re-running experiments, so its conclusions inherit those papers’ datasets, protocols, and evaluation conditions; the benchmark list is explicitly not guaranteed to be exhaustive.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1145/3641289

Cites

374 of 374 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

171 of 282 cited sources checked · 126 supported · 7 flagged · accuracy not yet measured

Show all 115 claims

  • It may state two separate claims as one. 105
  • Probably not a substantial claim. 103
  • The quote only partly states this claim. 3
169 of 169
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    LLMs possess the capabilities to solve diverse tasks, contrasting with prior models confined to solving specific tasks.

    “LLMs possess the capabilities to solve diverse tasks, contrasting with prior models confined to solving specific tasks.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    LLMs are increasingly used by individuals with critical information needs, such as students or patients.

    “Due to its great performance in handling different applications such as general natural language tasks and domain-specific ones, LLMs are increasingly used by individuals with critical information needs, such as students or patients.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    LLMs are primarily evaluated on English data, leading to a potential oversight of evaluating their multilingual performance.

    “However, due to the relatively recent emergence of this technology, LLMs are primarily evaluated on English data, leading to a potential oversight of evaluating their multilingual performance.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    There is a research gap in assessing the effectiveness of utilizing tools for LLMs.

    “In addition to existing evaluation benchmarks, there is a research gap in assessing the effectiveness of utilizing tools for LLMs.”
  • The authors state this as an assumption.

    LLMs are expected to demonstrate AGI abilities.

    “As we expect LLMs to demonstrate AGI abilities, a comprehensive understanding of the differences between human and AGI capacities becomes crucial in the creation of AGI benchmarks.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Current LLMs are not robust to input variations such as different grammars and expressions.

    “For instance, the same prompts but with different grammars and expressions could lead ChatGPT and other LLMs to generate diverse results, indicating that current LLMs are not robust to the inputs.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The concept and definition of robustness are constantly evolving.

    “Concurrently, the concept and definition of robustness are constantly evolving.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    There is a scarcity of research in the domain of trustworthy evaluation.

    “There is a scarcity of research in this domain”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    LLMs grow increasingly powerful with larger model sizes and training set sizes.

    “as LLMs grow increasingly powerful with larger model sizes and training set sizes”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    LLMs develop at a rapid rate.

    “given their rapid rate of development”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Existing evaluation protocols for most AI tasks rely on static and public benchmarks.

    “Existing evaluation protocols for most AI tasks rely on static and public benchmarks, i.e., the evaluation datasets and protocols are often publicly available.”
11 of 11

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.

  • GAOKAO-Bench citation points to a different paper

    Minor

    The text cites reference [245] for GAOKAO-Bench, but [245] is listed as a paper on tool-augmented math reasoning, identical to reference [244].

  • Figure date range excludes a month it says it includes

    Minor

    A range ending in June 2023 cannot include July 2023.

  • Publication date predates research discussed in the paper

    Minor

    The paper gives an August 2018 publication date but discusses a study it identifies as being from 2023.

3 of 3

Citations

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Show all 293 references

Research works printed but not linked: 8

  1. Chuan Guo, Geoff Pleiss, Yu Sun, and Kilian Q. Weinberger. 2017. On calibration of modern neural networks. In International Conference on Machine Learning. PMLR, 1321–1330.
  2. Ron Kohavi et al. 1995. A study of cross-validation and bootstrap for accuracy estimation and model selection. In IJCAI, Vol. 14. Montreal, Canada, 1137–1145.
  3. Chin-Yew Lin. 2004. ROUGE: A package for automatic evaluation of summaries. In Text Summarization Branches Out. Association for Computational Linguistics, Barcelona, Spain, 74–81. https://aclanthology.org/W04-1013
  4. Microsoft. 2023. Bing chat. https://www.bing.com/new (2023).
  5. Andrew M. Olney. 2023. Generating multiple choice questions from a textbook: LLMs match human performance on most metrics. In AIED Workshops.
  6. Yujia Qin Shihao Liang Yining Ye Kunlun Zhu Lan Yan Yaxi Lu Yankai Lin Xin Cong Xiangru Tang Bill Qian Sihan Zhao Runchu Tian Ruobing Xie Jie Zhou Mark Gerstein Dahai Li Zhiyuan Liu and Maosong Sun. 2023. ToolLLM: Facilitating Large Language Models to Master 16000+ Real-world APIs. (2023). arxiv:cs.AI/2307.16789
  7. Jindong Wang, Xixu Hu, Wenxin Hou, Hao Chen, Runkai Zheng, Yidong Wang, Linyi Yang, Haojun Huang, Wei Ye, Xiubo Geng, et al. 2023. On the robustness of ChatGPT: An adversarial and out-of-distribution perspective. In ICLR Workshop on Trustworthy and Reliable Large-Scale Machine Learning Models.
  8. Rich Zemel, Yu Wu, Kevin Swersky, Toni Pitassi, and Cynthia Dwork. 2013. Learning fair representations. In International Conference on Machine Learning. PMLR, 325–333.

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Metadata

Authors
Chang, Y., Wang, X., Wang, J., Wu, Y., Yang, L., Zhu, K., Chen, H., Yi, X., Wang, C., Wang, Y., Ye, W., Zhang, Y., Chang, Y., Yu, P. S., Yang, Q., & Xie, X.
Affiliations
  • Jilin University (CN)
  • Microsoft Research Asia (China) (CN)
  • Westlake University (CN)
  • Chinese Academy of Sciences (CN)
  • Carnegie Mellon University (US)
  • Peking University (CN)
  • University of Illinois Chicago (US)
  • Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HK)
Venue
ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology
Published
2024-03-29
Volume
15
Issue
3
Pages
1-45
ISSN
  • 2157-6904 (ISSN-L)
  • 2157-6912
OpenAlex
W4391136507
Cited by
4,254
References
293
Citations by year
2026: 1309 · 2025: 1807 · 2024: 1014
FWCI
445.52
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • ACM Transactions on Intelligent Systems and Technology (publishedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, cc-by)
  • Rare & Special e-Zone (The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology) (submittedVersion)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (cc-by)
Funders
NSF (III-2106758)
Topics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Topic Modeling
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Artificial Intelligence › Natural Language Processing Techniques
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition › Multimodal Machine Learning Applications
Keywords
large language models, LLM evaluation, evaluation benchmark, assessment tasks, reasoning, medical applications, ethics, AI agents, societal risk, assessment challenges

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