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Measuring Multitask Language Understanding (arxiv.org)
1 point by tristanz on Sep 9, 2020 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A new test asks text models multiple-choice questions across 57 school and professional subjects, from math to law, to check how much they know and reason. Most score near random; the biggest one beats chance by almost 20 points but stays below expert level.

Abstract · Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding

We propose a new test to measure a text model's multitask accuracy. The test covers 57 tasks including elementary mathematics, US history, computer science, law, and more. To attain high accuracy on this test, models must possess extensive world knowledge and problem solving ability. We find that while most recent models have near random-chance accuracy, the very largest GPT-3 model improves over random chance by almost 20 percentage points on average. However, on every one of the 57 tasks, the best models still need substantial improvements before they can reach expert-level accuracy. Models also have lopsided performance and frequently do not know when they are wrong. Worse, they still have near-random accuracy on some socially important subjects such as morality and law. By comprehensively evaluating the breadth and depth of a model's academic and professional understanding, our test can be used to analyze models across many tasks and to identify important shortcomings.

Dan Hendrycks, Collin Burns, Steven Basart, Andy Zou, Mantas Mazeika, Dawn Song, Jacob Steinhardt
arXiv:2009.03300 · cs.CY, cs.AI, cs.CL, cs.LG · submitted Sep 7, 2020 · updated Jan 12, 2021
abstract · pdf · html · ICLR 2021; the test and code is available at https://github.com/hendrycks/test

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Also discussed: Apr 2024 (1 point, 0 comments) · Sep 2020 (2 points, 0 comments)