Cited by 151Topic ModelingNatural Language Processing TechniquesMultimodal Machine Learning Applications

State of What Art? A Call for Multi-Prompt LLM Evaluation

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Mizrahi, Moran, Kaplan, Guy, Malkin, Dan, Dror, Rotem, Shahaf, Dafna, Stanovsky, Gabriel·2024·Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics

Abstract

Recent advances in LLMs have led to an abundance of evaluation benchmarks, which typically rely on a single instruction template per task. We create a large-scale collection of instruction paraphrases and comprehensively analyze the brittleness introduced by single-prompt evaluations across 6.5M instances, involving 20 different LLMs and 39 tasks from 3 benchmarks. We find that different instruction templates lead to very different performance, both absolute and relative. Instead, we propose a set of diverse metrics on multiple instruction paraphrases, specifically tailored for different use cases (e.g., LLM vs. downstream development), ensuring a more reliable and meaningful assessment of LLM capabilities. We show that our metrics provide new insights into the strengths and limitations of current LLMs.

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Crossref · 10.1162/tacl_a_00681

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  • LMs are not robust: the precise string used for a given prompt, even down to whitespace usage, can significantly impact performance.

    “LMs are not robust, often in seemingly unintuitive ways: for example, the precise string used for a given prompt, even down to whitespace usage, can significantly impact performance (Weber et al., 2023; Sclar et al., 2023; Mizrahi et al., 2024; Alzahrani et al., 2024; Webson and Pavlick, 2022).”

    From Lessons from the Trenches on Reproducible Evaluation of Language Models (2024) · cites this paper as Mizrahi et al., 2024

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Authors
Mizrahi, M., Kaplan, G., Malkin, D., Dror, R., Shahaf, D., & Stanovsky, G.
Affiliations
  • Hebrew University of Jerusalem (IL)
  • University of Haifa (IL)
Venue
Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Publisher
MIT Press
Published
2024
Volume
12
Pages
933-949
ISSN
2307-387X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W4401208776
Cited by
113
References
39
Citations by year
2026: 44 · 2025: 50 · 2024: 19
FWCI
16.68
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • arXiv (Cornell University) (submittedVersion, other-oa)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
  • arXiv (Cornell University)
Funders
  • European Commission (HORIZON2020)
  • Hebrew University of Jerusalem
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
LLM evaluation, LLM evaluation metrics

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