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Reasoning or Simply Next Token Prediction? Stress-Testing Large LLMs (arxiv.org)
2 points by PaulHoule on Jul 8, 2024 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: Test questions were rewritten so a key term became a made-up word with its definition, checking whether a model truly understands the idea or just matches familiar wording. Models that score high on the original tests did much worse after the swap.

Abstract · MMLU-SR: A Benchmark for Stress-Testing Reasoning Capability of Large Language Models

We propose MMLU-SR, a novel dataset designed to measure the true comprehension abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) by challenging their performance in question-answering tasks with modified terms. We reasoned that an agent that "truly" understands a concept can still evaluate it when key terms are replaced by suitably defined alternate terms, and sought to differentiate such comprehension from mere text replacement. In our study, we modified standardized test questions by replacing a key term with a dummy word along with its definition. The key term could be in the context of questions, answers, or both questions and answers. Notwithstanding the high scores achieved by recent popular LLMs on the MMLU leaderboard, we found a substantial reduction in model performance after such replacement, suggesting poor comprehension. This new benchmark provides a rigorous benchmark for testing true model comprehension, and poses a challenge to the broader scientific community.

Wentian Wang, Sarthak Jain, Paul Kantor, Jacob Feldman, Lazaros Gallos, Hao Wang
arXiv:2406.15468 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.LG · submitted Jun 15, 2024 · updated Oct 4, 2024
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