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PhantomWiki: On-Demand Datasets for Reasoning and Retrieval Evaluation (arxiv.org)
1 point by belter on Feb 28, 2025 | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: A tool builds a fresh fake encyclopedia with matching questions each time a model is tested, so answers can't be memorized from training data. Varying question difficulty and document count separates reasoning from search skill, and frontier models still struggle on these made-up worlds.

Abstract

High-quality benchmarks are essential for evaluating reasoning and retrieval capabilities of large language models (LLMs). However, curating datasets for this purpose is not a permanent solution as they are prone to data leakage and inflated performance results. To address these challenges, we propose PhantomWiki: a pipeline to generate unique, factually consistent document corpora with diverse question-answer pairs. Unlike prior work, PhantomWiki is neither a fixed dataset, nor is it based on any existing data. Instead, a new PhantomWiki instance is generated on demand for each evaluation. We vary the question difficulty and corpus size to disentangle reasoning and retrieval capabilities respectively, and find that PhantomWiki datasets are surprisingly challenging for frontier LLMs. Thus, we contribute a scalable and data leakage-resistant framework for disentangled evaluation of reasoning, retrieval, and tool-use abilities. Our code is available at https://github.com/kilian-group/phantom-wiki.

Albert Gong, Kamilė Stankevičiūtė, Chao Wan, Anmol Kabra, Raphael Thesmar, Johann Lee, Julius Klenke, Carla P. Gomes, Kilian Q. Weinberger
arXiv:2502.20377 · cs.LG, cs.AI, cs.CL · submitted Feb 27, 2025 · updated Jun 9, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to ICML 2025

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