Daily Papers

Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit extensive knowledge about the world, but most evaluations have been limited to global or anglocentric subjects. This raises the question of how well these models perform on topics relevant to other cultures, whose presence on the web is not that prominent. To address this gap, we introduce BertaQA, a multiple-choice trivia dataset that is parallel in English and Basque. The dataset consists of a local subset with questions pertinent to the Basque culture, and a global subset with questions of broader interest. We find that state-of-the-art LLMs struggle with local cultural knowledge, even as they excel on global topics. However, we show that continued pre-training in Basque significantly improves the models' performance on Basque culture, even when queried in English. To our knowledge, this is the first solid evidence of knowledge transfer from a low-resource to a high-resource language. Our analysis sheds light on the complex interplay between language and knowledge, and reveals that some prior findings do not fully hold when reassessed on local topics. Our dataset and evaluation code are available under open licenses at https://github.com/juletx/BertaQA.

When evaluating large language models (LLMs) with multiple-choice question answering (MCQA), it is common to end the prompt with the string "Answer:" to facilitate automated answer extraction via next-token probabilities. However, there is no consensus on how to tokenize the space following the colon, often overlooked as a trivial choice. In this paper, we uncover accuracy differences of up to 11% due to this (seemingly irrelevant) tokenization variation as well as reshuffled model rankings, raising concerns about the reliability of LLM comparisons in prior work. Surprisingly, we are able to recommend one specific strategy -- tokenizing the space together with the answer letter -- as we observe consistent and statistically significant performance improvements. Additionally, it improves model calibration, enhancing the reliability of the model's confidence estimates. Our findings underscore the importance of careful evaluation design and highlight the need for standardized, transparent evaluation protocols to ensure reliable and comparable results.

Visual understanding goes well beyond object recognition. With one glance at an image, we can effortlessly imagine the world beyond the pixels: for instance, we can infer people's actions, goals, and mental states. While this task is easy for humans, it is tremendously difficult for today's vision systems, requiring higher-order cognition and commonsense reasoning about the world. We formalize this task as Visual Commonsense Reasoning. Given a challenging question about an image, a machine must answer correctly and then provide a rationale justifying its answer. Next, we introduce a new dataset, VCR, consisting of 290k multiple choice QA problems derived from 110k movie scenes. The key recipe for generating non-trivial and high-quality problems at scale is Adversarial Matching, a new approach to transform rich annotations into multiple choice questions with minimal bias. Experimental results show that while humans find VCR easy (over 90% accuracy), state-of-the-art vision models struggle (~45%). To move towards cognition-level understanding, we present a new reasoning engine, Recognition to Cognition Networks (R2C), that models the necessary layered inferences for grounding, contextualization, and reasoning. R2C helps narrow the gap between humans and machines (~65%); still, the challenge is far from solved, and we provide analysis that suggests avenues for future work.

We introduce Latxa, a family of large language models for Basque ranging from 7 to 70 billion parameters. Latxa is based on Llama 2, which we continue pretraining on a new Basque corpus comprising 4.3M documents and 4.2B tokens. Addressing the scarcity of high-quality benchmarks for Basque, we further introduce 4 multiple choice evaluation datasets: EusProficiency, comprising 5,169 questions from official language proficiency exams; EusReading, comprising 352 reading comprehension questions; EusTrivia, comprising 1,715 trivia questions from 5 knowledge areas; and EusExams, comprising 16,774 questions from public examinations. In our extensive evaluation, Latxa outperforms all previous open models we compare to by a large margin. In addition, it is competitive with GPT-4 Turbo in language proficiency and understanding, despite lagging behind in reading comprehension and knowledge-intensive tasks. Both the Latxa family of models, as well as our new pretraining corpora and evaluation datasets, are publicly available under open licenses at https://github.com/hitz-zentroa/latxa. Our suite enables reproducible research on methods to build LLMs for low-resource languages.

We present TriviaQA, a challenging reading comprehension dataset containing over 650K question-answer-evidence triples. TriviaQA includes 95K question-answer pairs authored by trivia enthusiasts and independently gathered evidence documents, six per question on average, that provide high quality distant supervision for answering the questions. We show that, in comparison to other recently introduced large-scale datasets, TriviaQA (1) has relatively complex, compositional questions, (2) has considerable syntactic and lexical variability between questions and corresponding answer-evidence sentences, and (3) requires more cross sentence reasoning to find answers. We also present two baseline algorithms: a feature-based classifier and a state-of-the-art neural network, that performs well on SQuAD reading comprehension. Neither approach comes close to human performance (23% and 40% vs. 80%), suggesting that TriviaQA is a challenging testbed that is worth significant future study. Data and code available at -- http://nlp.cs.washington.edu/triviaqa/

Scholastic trivia competitions test knowledge and intelligence through mastery of question answering. Modern question answering benchmarks are one variant of the Turing test. Specifically, answering a set of questions as well as a human is a minimum bar towards demonstrating human-like intelligence. This paper makes the case that the format of one competition -- where participants can answer in the middle of hearing a question (incremental) -- better differentiates the skill between (human or machine) players. Additionally, merging a sequential decision-making sub-task with question answering (QA) provides a good setting for research in model calibration and opponent modeling. Thus, embedded in this task are three machine learning challenges: (1) factoid QA over thousands of Wikipedia-like answers, (2) calibration of the QA model's confidence scores, and (3) sequential decision-making that incorporates knowledge of the QA model, its calibration, and what the opponent may do. We make two contributions: (1) collecting and curating a large factoid QA dataset and an accompanying gameplay dataset, and (2) developing a model that addresses these three machine learning challenges. In addition to offline evaluation, we pitted our model against some of the most accomplished trivia players in the world in a series of exhibition matches spanning several years. Throughout this paper, we show that collaborations with the vibrant trivia community have contributed to the quality of our dataset, spawned new research directions, and doubled as an exciting way to engage the public with research in machine learning and natural language processing.

Multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) is often used to evaluate large language models (LLMs). To see if MCQA assesses LLMs as intended, we probe if LLMs can perform MCQA with choices-only prompts, where models must select the correct answer only from the choices. In three MCQA datasets and four LLMs, this prompt bests a majority baseline in 11/12 cases, with up to 0.33 accuracy gain. To help explain this behavior, we conduct an in-depth, black-box analysis on memorization, choice dynamics, and question inference. Our key findings are threefold. First, we find no evidence that the choices-only accuracy stems from memorization alone. Second, priors over individual choices do not fully explain choices-only accuracy, hinting that LLMs use the group dynamics of choices. Third, LLMs have some ability to infer a relevant question from choices, and surprisingly can sometimes even match the original question. We hope to motivate the use of stronger baselines in MCQA benchmarks, the design of robust MCQA datasets, and further efforts to explain LLM decision-making.

One of the most widely used methods to evaluate LLMs are Multiple Choice Question (MCQ) tests. MCQ benchmarks enable the testing of LLM knowledge on almost any topic at scale as the results can be processed automatically. To help the LLM answer, a few examples called few shots can be included in the prompt. Moreover, the LLM can be asked to answer the question directly with the selected option or to first provide the reasoning and then the selected answer, which is known as chain of thought. In addition to checking whether the selected answer is correct, the evaluation can look at the LLM-estimated probability of its response as an indication of the confidence of the LLM in the response. In this paper, we study how the LLM confidence in its answer depends on whether the model has been asked to answer directly or to provide the reasoning before answering. The results of the evaluation of questions on a wide range of topics in seven different models show that LLMs are more confident in their answers when they provide reasoning before the answer. This occurs regardless of whether the selected answer is correct. Our hypothesis is that this behavior is due to the reasoning that modifies the probability of the selected answer, as the LLM predicts the answer based on the input question and the reasoning that supports the selection made. Therefore, LLM estimated probabilities seem to have intrinsic limitations that should be understood in order to use them in evaluation procedures. Interestingly, the same behavior has been observed in humans, for whom explaining an answer increases confidence in its correctness.

Multiple choice question answering (MCQA) is popular for LLM evaluation due to its simplicity and human-like testing, but we argue for its reform. We first reveal flaws in MCQA's format, as it struggles to: 1) test generation/subjectivity; 2) match LLM use cases; and 3) fully test knowledge. We instead advocate for generative formats based on human testing-where LLMs construct and explain answers-better capturing user needs and knowledge while remaining easy to score. We then show even when MCQA is a useful format, its datasets suffer from: leakage; unanswerability; shortcuts; and saturation. In each issue, we give fixes from education, like rubrics to guide MCQ writing; scoring methods to bridle guessing; and Item Response Theory to build harder MCQs. Lastly, we discuss LLM errors in MCQA-robustness, biases, and unfaithful explanations-showing how our prior solutions better measure or address these issues. While we do not need to desert MCQA, we encourage more efforts in refining the task based on educational testing, advancing evaluations.

We present a novel method for obtaining high-quality, domain-targeted multiple choice questions from crowd workers. Generating these questions can be difficult without trading away originality, relevance or diversity in the answer options. Our method addresses these problems by leveraging a large corpus of domain-specific text and a small set of existing questions. It produces model suggestions for document selection and answer distractor choice which aid the human question generation process. With this method we have assembled SciQ, a dataset of 13.7K multiple choice science exam questions (Dataset available at http://allenai.org/data.html). We demonstrate that the method produces in-domain questions by providing an analysis of this new dataset and by showing that humans cannot distinguish the crowdsourced questions from original questions. When using SciQ as additional training data to existing questions, we observe accuracy improvements on real science exams.

Multiple Choice Question Answering (MCQA) is an important problem with numerous real-world applications, such as medicine, law, and education. The high cost of building MCQA datasets makes few-shot learning pivotal in this domain. While Large Language Models (LLMs) can enable few-shot learning, their direct application in real-world scenarios is often hindered by their high computational cost. To address this challenge, we propose a simple yet effective approach that uses LLMs for data generation and scoring. Our approach utilizes LLMs to create MCQA data which contains questions and choices, and to assign probability scores to the generated choices. We then use the generated data and LLM-assigned scores to finetune a smaller and more efficient encoder-only model, DeBERTa-v3-base by leveraging distillation loss. Extensive experiments on the Massive Multitask Language Understanding (MMLU) benchmark demonstrate that our method improves accuracy from 28.9% to 39.3%, representing a gain of over 10% compared to a baseline finetuned directly on 5-shot examples. This shows the effectiveness of LLM-driven data generation and knowledge distillation for few-shot MCQA.

We introduce a high-quality dataset that contains 3,397 samples comprising (i) multiple choice questions, (ii) answers (including distractors), and (iii) their source documents, from the educational domain. Each question is phrased in two forms, normal and close. Correct answers are linked to source documents with sentence-level annotations. Thus, our versatile dataset can be used for both question and distractor generation, as well as to explore new challenges such as question format conversion. Furthermore, 903 questions are accompanied by their cognitive complexity level as per Bloom's taxonomy. All questions have been generated by educational experts rather than crowd workers to ensure they are maintaining educational and learning standards. Our analysis and experiments suggest distinguishable differences between our dataset and commonly used ones for question generation for educational purposes. We believe this new dataset can serve as a valuable resource for research and evaluation in the educational domain. The dataset and baselines will be released to support further research in question generation.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are proficient at retrieving single facts from extended contexts, yet they struggle with tasks requiring the simultaneous retrieval of multiple facts, especially during generation. This paper identifies a novel "lost-in-the-middle" phenomenon, where LLMs progressively lose track of critical information throughout the generation process, resulting in incomplete or inaccurate retrieval. To address this challenge, we introduce Find All Crucial Texts (FACT), an iterative retrieval method that refines context through successive rounds of rewriting. This approach enables models to capture essential facts incrementally, which are often overlooked in single-pass retrieval. Experiments demonstrate that FACT substantially enhances multi-fact retrieval performance across various tasks, though improvements are less notable in general-purpose QA scenarios. Our findings shed light on the limitations of LLMs in multi-fact retrieval and underscore the need for more resilient long-context retrieval strategies.

A riddle is a question or statement with double or veiled meanings, followed by an unexpected answer. Solving riddle is a challenging task for both machine and human, testing the capability of understanding figurative, creative natural language and reasoning with commonsense knowledge. We introduce BiRdQA, a bilingual multiple-choice question answering dataset with 6614 English riddles and 8751 Chinese riddles. For each riddle-answer pair, we provide four distractors with additional information from Wikipedia. The distractors are automatically generated at scale with minimal bias. Existing monolingual and multilingual QA models fail to perform well on our dataset, indicating that there is a long way to go before machine can beat human on solving tricky riddles. The dataset has been released to the community.

In the field of natural language processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs) have precipitated a paradigm shift, markedly enhancing performance in natural language generation tasks. Despite these advancements, the comprehensive evaluation of LLMs remains an inevitable challenge for the community. Recently, the utilization of Multiple Choice Question Answering (MCQA) as a benchmark for LLMs has gained considerable traction. This study first investigates the limitations of MCQA as an evaluation method for LLMs and then analyzes the fundamental reason for the limitations of MCQA, that while LLMs may select the correct answers, it is possible that they also recognize other wrong options as correct. Finally, we propose a dataset augmenting method for Multiple-Choice Questions (MCQs), MCQA+, that can more accurately reflect the performance of the model, which underscores the need for more robust evaluation mechanisms in assessing the performance of LLMs.

This paper introduces MedMCQA, a new large-scale, Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) dataset designed to address real-world medical entrance exam questions. More than 194k high-quality AIIMS \& NEET PG entrance exam MCQs covering 2.4k healthcare topics and 21 medical subjects are collected with an average token length of 12.77 and high topical diversity. Each sample contains a question, correct answer(s), and other options which requires a deeper language understanding as it tests the 10+ reasoning abilities of a model across a wide range of medical subjects \& topics. A detailed explanation of the solution, along with the above information, is provided in this study.

Composing knowledge from multiple pieces of texts is a key challenge in multi-hop question answering. We present a multi-hop reasoning dataset, Question Answering via Sentence Composition(QASC), that requires retrieving facts from a large corpus and composing them to answer a multiple-choice question. QASC is the first dataset to offer two desirable properties: (a) the facts to be composed are annotated in a large corpus, and (b) the decomposition into these facts is not evident from the question itself. The latter makes retrieval challenging as the system must introduce new concepts or relations in order to discover potential decompositions. Further, the reasoning model must then learn to identify valid compositions of these retrieved facts using common-sense reasoning. To help address these challenges, we provide annotation for supporting facts as well as their composition. Guided by these annotations, we present a two-step approach to mitigate the retrieval challenges. We use other multiple-choice datasets as additional training data to strengthen the reasoning model. Our proposed approach improves over current state-of-the-art language models by 11% (absolute). The reasoning and retrieval problems, however, remain unsolved as this model still lags by 20% behind human performance.

AI has achieved remarkable mastery over games such as Chess, Go, and Poker, and even Jeopardy, but the rich variety of standardized exams has remained a landmark challenge. Even in 2016, the best AI system achieved merely 59.3% on an 8th Grade science exam challenge. This paper reports unprecedented success on the Grade 8 New York Regents Science Exam, where for the first time a system scores more than 90% on the exam's non-diagram, multiple choice (NDMC) questions. In addition, our Aristo system, building upon the success of recent language models, exceeded 83% on the corresponding Grade 12 Science Exam NDMC questions. The results, on unseen test questions, are robust across different test years and different variations of this kind of test. They demonstrate that modern NLP methods can result in mastery on this task. While not a full solution to general question-answering (the questions are multiple choice, and the domain is restricted to 8th Grade science), it represents a significant milestone for the field.

Recent work has highlighted the culturally-contingent nature of commonsense knowledge. We introduce AMAMMER{epsilon}, a test set of 525 multiple-choice questions designed to evaluate the commonsense knowledge of English LLMs, relative to the cultural contexts of Ghana and the United States. To create AMAMMER{epsilon}, we select a set of multiple-choice questions (MCQs) from existing commonsense datasets and rewrite them in a multi-stage process involving surveys of Ghanaian and U.S. participants. In three rounds of surveys, participants from both pools are solicited to (1) write correct and incorrect answer choices, (2) rate individual answer choices on a 5-point Likert scale, and (3) select the best answer choice from the newly-constructed MCQ items, in a final validation step. By engaging participants at multiple stages, our procedure ensures that participant perspectives are incorporated both in the creation and validation of test items, resulting in high levels of agreement within each pool. We evaluate several off-the-shelf English LLMs on AMAMMER{epsilon}. Uniformly, models prefer answers choices that align with the preferences of U.S. annotators over Ghanaian annotators. Additionally, when test items specify a cultural context (Ghana or the U.S.), models exhibit some ability to adapt, but performance is consistently better in U.S. contexts than Ghanaian. As large resources are devoted to the advancement of English LLMs, our findings underscore the need for culturally adaptable models and evaluations to meet the needs of diverse English-speaking populations around the world.

Multiple choice question answering tasks evaluate the reasoning, comprehension, and mathematical abilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). While existing benchmarks employ automatic translation for multilingual evaluation, this approach is error-prone and potentially introduces culturally biased questions, especially in social sciences. We introduce the first multitask, multiple-choice Turkish QA benchmark, TurkishMMLU, to evaluate LLMs' understanding of the Turkish language. TurkishMMLU includes over 10,000 questions, covering 9 different subjects from Turkish high-school education curricula. These questions are written by curriculum experts, suitable for the high-school curricula in Turkey, covering subjects ranging from natural sciences and math questions to more culturally representative topics such as Turkish Literature and the history of the Turkish Republic. We evaluate over 20 LLMs, including multilingual open-source (e.g., Gemma, Llama, MT5), closed-source (GPT 4o, Claude, Gemini), and Turkish-adapted (e.g., Trendyol) models. We provide an extensive evaluation, including zero-shot and few-shot evaluation of LLMs, chain-of-thought reasoning, and question difficulty analysis along with model performance. We provide an in-depth analysis of the Turkish capabilities and limitations of current LLMs to provide insights for future LLMs for the Turkish language. We publicly release our code for the dataset and evaluation: https://github.com/ArdaYueksel/TurkishMMLU.

This paper presents a systematic study on enabling medical reasoning models (MRMs) to generate ranked lists of answers for open-ended questions. Clinical decision-making rarely relies on a single answer but instead considers multiple options, reducing the risks of narrow perspectives. Yet current MRMs are typically trained to produce only one answer, even in open-ended settings. We propose an alternative format: ranked lists and investigate two approaches: prompting and fine-tuning. While prompting is a cost-effective way to steer an MRM's response, not all MRMs generalize well across different answer formats: choice, short text, and list answers. Based on our prompting findings, we train and evaluate MRMs using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT). SFT teaches a model to imitate annotated responses, and RFT incentivizes exploration through the responses that maximize a reward. We propose new reward functions targeted at ranked-list answer formats, and conduct ablation studies for RFT. Our results show that while some SFT models generalize to certain answer formats, models trained with RFT are more robust across multiple formats. We also present a case study on a modified MedQA with multiple valid answers, finding that although MRMs might fail to select the benchmark's preferred ground truth, they can recognize valid answers. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first systematic investigation of approaches for enabling MRMs to generate answers as ranked lists. We hope this work provides a first step toward developing alternative answer formats that are beneficial beyond single answers in medical domains.

This paper introduces FrenchMedMCQA, the first publicly available Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) dataset in French for medical domain. It is composed of 3,105 questions taken from real exams of the French medical specialization diploma in pharmacy, mixing single and multiple answers. Each instance of the dataset contains an identifier, a question, five possible answers and their manual correction(s). We also propose first baseline models to automatically process this MCQA task in order to report on the current performances and to highlight the difficulty of the task. A detailed analysis of the results showed that it is necessary to have representations adapted to the medical domain or to the MCQA task: in our case, English specialized models yielded better results than generic French ones, even though FrenchMedMCQA is in French. Corpus, models and tools are available online.

Despite their sophisticated capabilities, large language models (LLMs) encounter a major hurdle in effective assessment. This paper first revisits the prevalent evaluation method-multiple choice question answering (MCQA), which allows for straightforward accuracy measurement. Through a comprehensive evaluation of 24 models across 11 benchmarks, we highlight several potential drawbacks of MCQA, for instance, the inconsistency between the MCQA evaluation and the generation of open-ended responses in practical scenarios. In response, we introduce an RWQ-Elo rating system, engaging 24 LLMs such as GPT-4, GPT-3.5, Google-Gemini-Pro and LLaMA-1/-2, in a two-player competitive format, with GPT-4 serving as the judge. Each LLM receives an Elo rating thereafter. This system is designed to mirror real-world usage, and for this purpose, we have compiled a new benchmark called ``Real-world questions'' (RWQ), comprising 20,772 authentic user inquiries. Additionally, we thoroughly analyze the characteristics of our system and compare it with prior leaderboards like AlpacaEval and MT-Bench. Our analysis reveals the stability of our RWQ-Elo system, the feasibility of registering new models, and its potential to reshape LLM leaderboards.

Given questions regarding some prototypical situation such as Name something that people usually do before they leave the house for work? a human can easily answer them via acquired experiences. There can be multiple right answers for such questions, with some more common for a situation than others. This paper introduces a new question answering dataset for training and evaluating common sense reasoning capabilities of artificial intelligence systems in such prototypical situations. The training set is gathered from an existing set of questions played in a long-running international game show FAMILY- FEUD. The hidden evaluation set is created by gathering answers for each question from 100 crowd-workers. We also propose a generative evaluation task where a model has to output a ranked list of answers, ideally covering all prototypical answers for a question. After presenting multiple competitive baseline models, we find that human performance still exceeds model scores on all evaluation metrics with a meaningful gap, supporting the challenging nature of the task.

The integration of retrieved passages and large language models (LLMs), such as ChatGPTs, has significantly contributed to improving open-domain question answering. However, there is still a lack of exploration regarding the optimal approach for incorporating retrieved passages into the answer generation process. This paper aims to fill this gap by investigating different methods of combining retrieved passages with LLMs to enhance answer generation. We begin by examining the limitations of a commonly-used concatenation approach. Surprisingly, this approach often results in generating "unknown" outputs, even when the correct document is among the top-k retrieved passages. To address this issue, we explore four alternative strategies for integrating the retrieved passages with the LLMs. These strategies include two single-round methods that utilize chain-of-thought reasoning and two multi-round strategies that incorporate feedback loops. Through comprehensive analyses and experiments, we provide insightful observations on how to effectively leverage retrieved passages to enhance the answer generation capability of LLMs.

The present study aims to explore the capabilities of Language Models (LMs) in tackling high-stakes multiple-choice tests, represented here by the Exame Nacional do Ensino M\'edio (ENEM), a multidisciplinary entrance examination widely adopted by Brazilian universities. This exam poses challenging tasks for LMs, since its questions may span into multiple fields of knowledge, requiring understanding of information from diverse domains. For instance, a question may require comprehension of both statistics and biology to be solved. This work analyzed responses generated by GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 models for questions presented in the 2009-2017 exams, as well as for questions of the 2022 exam, which were made public after the training of the models was completed. Furthermore, different prompt strategies were tested, including the use of Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompts to generate explanations for answers. On the 2022 edition, the best-performing model, GPT-4 with CoT, achieved an accuracy of 87%, largely surpassing GPT-3.5 by 11 points. The code and data used on experiments are available at https://github.com/piresramon/gpt-4-enem.

We introduce a multi-stage prompting approach (MSP) for the generation of multiple choice questions (MCQs), harnessing the capabilities of GPT models such as text-davinci-003 and GPT-4, renowned for their excellence across various NLP tasks. Our approach incorporates the innovative concept of chain-of-thought prompting, a progressive technique in which the GPT model is provided with a series of interconnected cues to guide the MCQ generation process. Automated evaluations consistently demonstrate the superiority of our proposed MSP method over the traditional single-stage prompting (SSP) baseline, resulting in the production of high-quality distractors. Furthermore, the one-shot MSP technique enhances automatic evaluation results, contributing to improved distractor generation in multiple languages, including English, German, Bengali, and Hindi. In human evaluations, questions generated using our approach exhibit superior levels of grammaticality, answerability, and difficulty, highlighting its efficacy in various languages.

One of the most widely used tasks to evaluate Large Language Models (LLMs) is Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA). While open-ended question answering tasks are more challenging to evaluate, MCQA tasks are, in principle, easier to assess, as the model's answer is thought to be simple to extract and is directly compared to a set of predefined choices. However, recent studies have started to question the reliability of MCQA evaluation, showing that multiple factors can significantly impact the reported performance of LLMs, especially when the model generates free-form text before selecting one of the answer choices. In this work, we shed light on the inconsistencies of MCQA evaluation strategies, which can lead to inaccurate and misleading model comparisons. We systematically analyze whether existing answer extraction methods are aligned with human judgment, and how they are influenced by answer constraints in the prompt across different domains. Our experiments demonstrate that traditional evaluation strategies often underestimate LLM capabilities, while LLM-based answer extractors are prone to systematic errors. Moreover, we reveal a fundamental trade-off between including format constraints in the prompt to simplify answer extraction and allowing models to generate free-form text to improve reasoning. Our findings call for standardized evaluation methodologies and highlight the need for more reliable and consistent MCQA evaluation practices.

Multi-modal large language models(MLLMs) have achieved remarkable progress and demonstrated powerful knowledge comprehension and reasoning abilities. However, the mastery of domain-specific knowledge, which is essential for evaluating the intelligence of MLLMs, continues to be a challenge. Current multi-modal benchmarks for domain-specific knowledge concentrate on multiple-choice questions and are predominantly available in English, which imposes limitations on the comprehensiveness of the evaluation. To this end, we introduce CMMU, a novel benchmark for multi-modal and multi-type question understanding and reasoning in Chinese. CMMU consists of 3,603 questions in 7 subjects, covering knowledge from primary to high school. The questions can be categorized into 3 types: multiple-choice, multiple-response, and fill-in-the-blank, bringing greater challenges to MLLMs. In addition, we propose a rigorous evaluation strategy called ShiftCheck for assessing multiple-choice questions. The strategy aims to reduce position bias, minimize the influence of randomness on correctness, and perform a quantitative analysis of position bias. We evaluate seven open-source MLLMs along with GPT4-V, Gemini-Pro, and Qwen-VL-Plus. The results demonstrate that CMMU poses a significant challenge to the recent MLLMs.

We evaluate how well Large Language Models (LLMs) latently recall and compose facts to answer multi-hop queries like "In the year Scarlett Johansson was born, the Summer Olympics were hosted in the country of". One major challenge in evaluating this ability is that LLMs may have developed shortcuts by encounters of the head entity "Scarlett Johansson" and the answer entity "United States" in the same training sequences or merely guess the answer based on frequency-based priors. To prevent shortcuts, we exclude test queries where the head and answer entities co-appear in pretraining corpora. Through careful selection of relations and facts and systematic removal of cases where models might guess answers or exploit partial matches, we construct an evaluation dataset SOCRATES (ShOrtCut-fRee lATent rEaSoning). We observe that LLMs demonstrate promising latent multi-hop reasoning abilities without exploiting shortcuts, but only for certain types of queries. For queries requiring latent recall of countries as the intermediate answer, the best models achieve 80% latent composability, but this drops to just 5% for the recall of years. Comparisons with Chain-of-Thought composability highlight a significant gap between the ability of models to reason latently versus explicitly. Analysis reveals that latent representations of the intermediate answer are constructed more often in queries with higher latent composability, and shows the emergence of latent multi-hop reasoning during pretraining.

We present HEAD-QA, a multi-choice question answering testbed to encourage research on complex reasoning. The questions come from exams to access a specialized position in the Spanish healthcare system, and are challenging even for highly specialized humans. We then consider monolingual (Spanish) and cross-lingual (to English) experiments with information retrieval and neural techniques. We show that: (i) HEAD-QA challenges current methods, and (ii) the results lag well behind human performance, demonstrating its usefulness as a benchmark for future work.

Multiple choice benchmarks have long been the workhorse of language model evaluation because grading multiple choice is objective and easy to automate. However, we show multiple choice questions from popular benchmarks can often be answered without even seeing the question. These shortcuts arise from a fundamental limitation of discriminative evaluation not shared by evaluations of the model's free-form, generative answers. Until recently, there appeared to be no viable, scalable alternative to multiple choice--but, we show that this has changed. We consider generative evaluation via what we call answer matching: Give the candidate model the question without the options, have it generate a free-form response, then use a modern language model with the reference answer to determine if the response matches the reference. To compare the validity of different evaluation strategies, we annotate MMLU-Pro and GPQA-Diamond to obtain human grading data, and measure the agreement of each evaluation approach. We find answer matching using recent models--even small ones--achieves near-perfect agreement, in the range of inter-annotator agreement. In contrast, both multiple choice evaluation and using LLM-as-a-judge without reference answers aligns poorly with human grading. Improving evaluations via answer matching is not merely a conceptual concern: the rankings of several models change significantly when evaluating their free-form responses with answer matching. In light of these findings, we discuss how to move the evaluation ecosystem from multiple choice to answer matching.

The zero-shot chain of thought (CoT) approach is often used in question answering (QA) by language models (LMs) for tasks that require multiple reasoning steps, typically enhanced by the prompt "Let's think step by step." However, some QA tasks hinge more on accessing relevant knowledge than on chaining reasoning steps. We introduce a simple general prompting technique, called PREP, that involves using two instances of LMs: the first (LM1) generates relevant information, and the second (LM2) answers the question based on this information. PREP is designed to be general and independent of the user's domain knowledge, making it applicable across various QA tasks without the need for specialized prompt engineering. To evaluate the effectiveness of our prompting method, we create a dataset of 100 binary-choice questions, derived from an extensive schematic dataset on artifact parts and material composition. These questions ask which of two artifacts is less likely to share materials with another artifact. Such questions probe the LM's knowledge of shared materials in the part structure of different artifacts. We test our method on our dataset and three published commonsense reasoning datasets. The average accuracy of our method is consistently higher than that of all the other tested methods across all the tested datasets.

This paper examines the zero-shot ability of Large Language Models (LLMs) to detect multiple-choice questions with no correct answer, a crucial aspect of educational assessment quality. We explore this ability not only as a measure of subject matter knowledge but also as an indicator of critical thinking within LLMs. Our experiments, utilizing a range of LLMs on diverse questions, highlight the significant performance gap between questions with a single correct answer and those without. Llama-3.1-405B stands out by successfully identifying the lack of a valid answer in many instances. These findings suggest that LLMs should prioritize critical thinking over blind instruction following and caution against their use in educational settings where questions with incorrect answers might lead to inaccurate evaluations. This research sets a benchmark for assessing critical thinking in LLMs and emphasizes the need for ongoing model alignment to ensure genuine user comprehension and assistance.

When answering a question, people often draw upon their rich world knowledge in addition to the particular context. Recent work has focused primarily on answering questions given some relevant document or context, and required very little general background. To investigate question answering with prior knowledge, we present CommonsenseQA: a challenging new dataset for commonsense question answering. To capture common sense beyond associations, we extract from ConceptNet (Speer et al., 2017) multiple target concepts that have the same semantic relation to a single source concept. Crowd-workers are asked to author multiple-choice questions that mention the source concept and discriminate in turn between each of the target concepts. This encourages workers to create questions with complex semantics that often require prior knowledge. We create 12,247 questions through this procedure and demonstrate the difficulty of our task with a large number of strong baselines. Our best baseline is based on BERT-large (Devlin et al., 2018) and obtains 56% accuracy, well below human performance, which is 89%.

We introduce EXAMS-V, a new challenging multi-discipline multimodal multilingual exam benchmark for evaluating vision language models. It consists of 20,932 multiple-choice questions across 20 school disciplines covering natural science, social science, and other miscellaneous studies, e.g., religion, fine arts, business, etc. EXAMS-V includes a variety of multimodal features such as text, images, tables, figures, diagrams, maps, scientific symbols, and equations. The questions come in 11 languages from 7 language families. Unlike existing benchmarks, EXAMS-V is uniquely curated by gathering school exam questions from various countries, with a variety of education systems. This distinctive approach calls for intricate reasoning across diverse languages and relies on region-specific knowledge. Solving the problems in the dataset requires advanced perception and joint reasoning over the text and the visual content of the image. Our evaluation results demonstrate that this is a challenging dataset, which is difficult even for advanced vision-text models such as GPT-4V and Gemini; this underscores the inherent complexity of the dataset and its significance as a future benchmark.

While large language models (LMs) demonstrate remarkable performance, they encounter challenges in providing accurate responses when queried for information beyond their pre-trained memorization. Although augmenting them with relevant external information can mitigate these issues, failure to consider the necessity of retrieval may adversely affect overall performance. Previous research has primarily focused on examining how entities influence retrieval models and knowledge recall in LMs, leaving other aspects relatively unexplored. In this work, our goal is to offer a more detailed, fact-centric analysis by exploring the effects of combinations of entities and relations. To facilitate this, we construct a new question answering (QA) dataset called WiTQA (Wikipedia Triple Question Answers). This dataset includes questions about entities and relations of various popularity levels, each accompanied by a supporting passage. Our extensive experiments with diverse LMs and retrievers reveal when retrieval does not consistently enhance LMs from the viewpoints of fact-centric popularity.Confirming earlier findings, we observe that larger LMs excel in recalling popular facts. However, they notably encounter difficulty with infrequent entity-relation pairs compared to retrievers. Interestingly, they can effectively retain popular relations of less common entities. We demonstrate the efficacy of our finer-grained metric and insights through an adaptive retrieval system that selectively employs retrieval and recall based on the frequencies of entities and relations in the question.

We study whether Large Language Models (LLMs) latently perform multi-hop reasoning with complex prompts such as "The mother of the singer of 'Superstition' is". We look for evidence of a latent reasoning pathway where an LLM (1) latently identifies "the singer of 'Superstition'" as Stevie Wonder, the bridge entity, and (2) uses its knowledge of Stevie Wonder's mother to complete the prompt. We analyze these two hops individually and consider their co-occurrence as indicative of latent multi-hop reasoning. For the first hop, we test if changing the prompt to indirectly mention the bridge entity instead of any other entity increases the LLM's internal recall of the bridge entity. For the second hop, we test if increasing this recall causes the LLM to better utilize what it knows about the bridge entity. We find strong evidence of latent multi-hop reasoning for the prompts of certain relation types, with the reasoning pathway used in more than 80% of the prompts. However, the utilization is highly contextual, varying across different types of prompts. Also, on average, the evidence for the second hop and the full multi-hop traversal is rather moderate and only substantial for the first hop. Moreover, we find a clear scaling trend with increasing model size for the first hop of reasoning but not for the second hop. Our experimental findings suggest potential challenges and opportunities for future development and applications of LLMs.

Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing information retrieval, with chatbots becoming an important source for answering user queries. As by their design, LLMs prioritize generating correct answers, the value of highly plausible yet incorrect answers (candidate answers) tends to be overlooked. However, such answers can still prove useful, for example, they can play a crucial role in tasks like Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) and QA Robustness Assessment (QARA). Existing QA datasets primarily focus on correct answers without explicit consideration of the plausibility of other candidate answers, limiting opportunity for more nuanced evaluations of models. To address this gap, we introduce PlausibleQA, a large-scale dataset comprising 10,000 questions and 100,000 candidate answers, each annotated with plausibility scores and justifications for their selection. Additionally, the dataset includes 900,000 justifications for pairwise comparisons between candidate answers, further refining plausibility assessments. We evaluate PlausibleQA through human assessments and empirical experiments, demonstrating its utility in MCQA and QARA analysis. Our findings show that plausibility-aware approaches are effective for MCQA distractor generation and QARA. We release PlausibleQA as a resource for advancing QA research and enhancing LLM performance in distinguishing plausible distractors from correct answers.

Multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) has been a popular format for evaluating and reinforcement fine-tuning (RFT) of modern multimodal language models. Its constrained output format allows for simplified, deterministic automatic verification. However, we find that the options may leak exploitable signals, which makes the accuracy metrics unreliable for indicating real capabilities and encourages explicit or implicit answer guessing behaviors during RFT. We propose ReVeL (Rewrite and Verify by LLM), a framework that rewrites multiple-choice questions into open-form questions while keeping answers verifiable whenever possible. The framework categorizes questions according to different answer types, apply different rewriting and verification schemes, respectively. When applied for RFT, we converted 20k MCQA examples and use GRPO to finetune Qwen2.5-VL models. Models trained on ReVeL-OpenQA match MCQA accuracy on multiple-choice benchmarks and improve OpenQA accuracy by about six percentage points, indicating better data efficiency and more robust reward signals than MCQA-based training. When used for evaluation, ReVeL also reveals up to 20 percentage points of score inflation in MCQA benchmarks (relative to OpenQA), improves judging accuracy, and reduces both cost and latency. We will release code and data publicly.

A standard way to evaluate the abilities of LLM involves presenting a multiple-choice question and selecting the option with the highest logit as the model's predicted answer. However, such a format for evaluating LLMs has limitations, since even if the model knows the correct answer, it may struggle to select the corresponding letter simply due to difficulties in following this rigid format. To address this, we introduce new scores that better capture and reveal model's underlying knowledge: the Query-Key Score (QK-score), derived from the interaction between query and key representations in attention heads, and the Attention Score, based on attention weights. These scores are extracted from specific select-and-copy heads, which show consistent performance across popular Multi-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) datasets. Based on these scores, our method improves knowledge extraction, yielding up to 16\% gain for LLaMA2-7B and up to 10\% for larger models on popular MCQA benchmarks. At the same time, the accuracy on a simple synthetic dataset, where the model explicitly knows the right answer, increases by almost 60\%, achieving nearly perfect accuracy, therefore demonstrating the method's efficiency in mitigating MCQA format limitations. To support our claims, we conduct experiments on models ranging from 7 billion to 70 billion parameters in both zero- and few-shot setups.

Generative models for open domain question answering have proven to be competitive, without resorting to external knowledge. While promising, this approach requires to use models with billions of parameters, which are expensive to train and query. In this paper, we investigate how much these models can benefit from retrieving text passages, potentially containing evidence. We obtain state-of-the-art results on the Natural Questions and TriviaQA open benchmarks. Interestingly, we observe that the performance of this method significantly improves when increasing the number of retrieved passages. This is evidence that generative models are good at aggregating and combining evidence from multiple passages.

Recently, reading comprehension models achieved near-human performance on large-scale datasets such as SQuAD, CoQA, MS Macro, RACE, etc. This is largely due to the release of pre-trained contextualized representations such as BERT and ELMo, which can be fine-tuned for the target task. Despite those advances and the creation of more challenging datasets, most of the work is still done for English. Here, we study the effectiveness of multilingual BERT fine-tuned on large-scale English datasets for reading comprehension (e.g., for RACE), and we apply it to Bulgarian multiple-choice reading comprehension. We propose a new dataset containing 2,221 questions from matriculation exams for twelfth grade in various subjects -history, biology, geography and philosophy-, and 412 additional questions from online quizzes in history. While the quiz authors gave no relevant context, we incorporate knowledge from Wikipedia, retrieving documents matching the combination of question + each answer option. Moreover, we experiment with different indexing and pre-training strategies. The evaluation results show accuracy of 42.23%, which is well above the baseline of 24.89%.

State-of-the-art summarization systems can generate highly fluent summaries. These summaries, however, may contain factual inconsistencies and/or information not present in the source. Hence, an important component of assessing the quality of summaries is to determine whether there is information consistency between the source and the summary. Existing approaches are typically based on lexical matching or representation-based methods. In this work, we introduce an alternative scheme based on standard information-theoretic measures in which the information present in the source and summary is directly compared. We propose a Multiple-choice Question Answering and Generation framework, MQAG, which approximates the information consistency by computing the expected KL-divergence between summary and source answer distributions over automatically generated multiple-choice questions. This approach exploits multiple-choice answer probabilities, as predicted answer distributions can be easily compared. We conduct experiments on four summary evaluation datasets: QAG-CNNDM/XSum, XSum-Faithfulness, Podcast Assessment, and SummEval. Experiments show that MQAG (using models trained on RACE) outperforms existing evaluation methods on the majority of tasks.

Flashcard schedulers are tools that rely on 1) student models to predict the flashcards a student knows; and 2) teaching policies to schedule cards based on these predictions. Existing student models, however, only use flashcard-level features, like the student's past responses, ignoring the semantic ties of flashcards. Deep Knowledge Tracing (DKT) models can capture semantic relations with language models, but are inefficient, lack content-rich datasets for evaluation, and require robust teaching policies. To address these issues, we design KARL, a DKT-inspired student model that uses retrieval and BERT embeddings for efficient and accurate student recall predictions. To test KARL, we collect a new dataset of diverse study history on trivia questions. KARL bests existing student models in AUC and calibration error. Finally, we propose a novel teaching policy that exploits the predictive power of DKT models to deploy KARL online. Based on 27 learners and 32 6-day study trajectories, KARL shows the ability to enhance medium-term educational learning, proving its efficacy for scheduling.

Multi-choice questions (MCQs) serve as a common yet important task format in the research of large language models (LLMs). Our work shows that LLMs exhibit an inherent "selection bias" in MCQs, which refers to LLMs' preferences to select options located at specific positions (like "Option C"). This bias is prevalent across various LLMs, making their performance vulnerable to option position changes in MCQs. We identify that one primary cause resulting in selection bias is option numbering, i.e., the ID symbols A/B/C/D associated with the options. To mitigate selection bias, we propose a new method called PriDe. PriDe first decomposes the observed model prediction distribution into an intrinsic prediction over option contents and a prior distribution over option IDs. It then estimates the prior by permutating option contents on a small number of test samples, which is used to debias the subsequent test samples. We demonstrate that, as a label-free, inference-time method, PriDe achieves a more effective and computation-efficient debiasing than strong baselines. We further show that the priors estimated by PriDe generalize well across different domains, highlighting its practical potential in broader scenarios.

Large Language Models (LLMs) like ChatGPT demonstrate significant potential in the medical field, often evaluated using multiple-choice questions (MCQs) similar to those found on the USMLE. Despite their prevalence in medical education, MCQs have limitations that might be exacerbated when assessing LLMs. To evaluate the effectiveness of MCQs in assessing the performance of LLMs, we developed a fictional medical benchmark focused on a non-existent gland, the Glianorex. This approach allowed us to isolate the knowledge of the LLM from its test-taking abilities. We used GPT-4 to generate a comprehensive textbook on the Glianorex in both English and French and developed corresponding multiple-choice questions in both languages. We evaluated various open-source, proprietary, and domain-specific LLMs using these questions in a zero-shot setting. The models achieved average scores around 67%, with minor performance differences between larger and smaller models. Performance was slightly higher in English than in French. Fine-tuned medical models showed some improvement over their base versions in English but not in French. The uniformly high performance across models suggests that traditional MCQ-based benchmarks may not accurately measure LLMs' clinical knowledge and reasoning abilities, instead highlighting their pattern recognition skills. This study underscores the need for more robust evaluation methods to better assess the true capabilities of LLMs in medical contexts.

We introduce the MovieQA dataset which aims to evaluate automatic story comprehension from both video and text. The dataset consists of 14,944 questions about 408 movies with high semantic diversity. The questions range from simpler "Who" did "What" to "Whom", to "Why" and "How" certain events occurred. Each question comes with a set of five possible answers; a correct one and four deceiving answers provided by human annotators. Our dataset is unique in that it contains multiple sources of information -- video clips, plots, subtitles, scripts, and DVS. We analyze our data through various statistics and methods. We further extend existing QA techniques to show that question-answering with such open-ended semantics is hard. We make this data set public along with an evaluation benchmark to encourage inspiring work in this challenging domain.

Factual questions typically can be answered correctly at different levels of granularity. For example, both ``August 4, 1961'' and ``1961'' are correct answers to the question ``When was Barack Obama born?''. Standard question answering (QA) evaluation protocols, however, do not explicitly take this into account and compare a predicted answer against answers of a single granularity level. In this work, we propose GRANOLA QA, a novel evaluation setting where a predicted answer is evaluated in terms of accuracy and informativeness against a set of multi-granularity answers. We present a simple methodology for enriching existing datasets with multi-granularity answers, and create GRANOLA-EQ, a multi-granularity version of the EntityQuestions dataset. We evaluate a range of decoding methods on GRANOLA-EQ, including a new algorithm, called Decoding with Response Aggregation (DRAG), that is geared towards aligning the response granularity with the model's uncertainty. Our experiments show that large language models with standard decoding tend to generate specific answers, which are often incorrect. In contrast, when evaluated on multi-granularity answers, DRAG yields a nearly 20 point increase in accuracy on average, which further increases for rare entities. Overall, this reveals that standard evaluation and decoding schemes may significantly underestimate the knowledge encapsulated in LMs.

Circuit analysis is a promising technique for understanding the internal mechanisms of language models. However, existing analyses are done in small models far from the state of the art. To address this, we present a case study of circuit analysis in the 70B Chinchilla model, aiming to test the scalability of circuit analysis. In particular, we study multiple-choice question answering, and investigate Chinchilla's capability to identify the correct answer label given knowledge of the correct answer text. We find that the existing techniques of logit attribution, attention pattern visualization, and activation patching naturally scale to Chinchilla, allowing us to identify and categorize a small set of `output nodes' (attention heads and MLPs). We further study the `correct letter' category of attention heads aiming to understand the semantics of their features, with mixed results. For normal multiple-choice question answers, we significantly compress the query, key and value subspaces of the head without loss of performance when operating on the answer labels for multiple-choice questions, and we show that the query and key subspaces represent an `Nth item in an enumeration' feature to at least some extent. However, when we attempt to use this explanation to understand the heads' behaviour on a more general distribution including randomized answer labels, we find that it is only a partial explanation, suggesting there is more to learn about the operation of `correct letter' heads on multiple choice question answering.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have shown unprecedented potential in various fields, especially as the backbones for question-answering (QA) systems. However, they tend to be easily deceived by tricky questions such as "How many eyes does the sun have?". Such frailties of PLMs often allude to the lack of knowledge within them. In this paper, we find that the PLMs already possess the knowledge required to rebut such questions, and the key is how to activate the knowledge. To systematize this observation, we investigate the PLMs' responses to one kind of tricky questions, i.e., the false premises questions (FPQs). We annotate a FalseQA dataset containing 2365 human-written FPQs, with the corresponding explanations for the false premises and the revised true premise questions. Using FalseQA, we discover that PLMs are capable of discriminating FPQs by fine-tuning on moderate numbers (e.g., 256) of examples. PLMs also generate reasonable explanations for the false premise, which serve as rebuttals. Further replaying a few general questions during training allows PLMs to excel on FPQs and general questions simultaneously. Our work suggests that once the rebuttal ability is stimulated, knowledge inside the PLMs can be effectively utilized to handle FPQs, which incentivizes the research on PLM-based QA systems.

We present the ARC-DA dataset, a direct-answer ("open response", "freeform") version of the ARC (AI2 Reasoning Challenge) multiple-choice dataset. While ARC has been influential in the community, its multiple-choice format is unrepresentative of real-world questions, and multiple choice formats can be particularly susceptible to artifacts. The ARC-DA dataset addresses these concerns by converting questions to direct-answer format using a combination of crowdsourcing and expert review. The resulting dataset contains 2985 questions with a total of 8436 valid answers (questions typically have more than one valid answer). ARC-DA is one of the first DA datasets of natural questions that often require reasoning, and where appropriate question decompositions are not evident from the questions themselves. We describe the conversion approach taken, appropriate evaluation metrics, and several strong models. Although high, the best scores (81% GENIE, 61.4% F1, 63.2% ROUGE-L) still leave considerable room for improvement. In addition, the dataset provides a natural setting for new research on explanation, as many questions require reasoning to construct answers. We hope the dataset spurs further advances in complex question-answering by the community. ARC-DA is available at https://allenai.org/data/arc-da

Cognitive textual and visual reasoning tasks, such as puzzles, series, and analogies, demand the ability to quickly reason, decipher, and evaluate patterns both textually and spatially. While LLMs and VLMs, through extensive training on large amounts of human-curated data, have attained a high level of pseudo-human intelligence in some common sense reasoning tasks, they still struggle with more complex reasoning tasks that require cognitive understanding. In this work, we introduce a new dataset, NTSEBench, designed to evaluate the cognitive multi-modal reasoning and problem-solving skills of large models. The dataset comprises 2,728 multiple-choice questions comprising of a total of 4,642 images across 26 categories sampled from the NTSE examination conducted nationwide in India, featuring both visual and textual general aptitude questions that do not rely on rote learning. We establish baselines on the dataset using state-of-the-art LLMs and VLMs. To facilitate a comparison between open source and propriety models, we propose four distinct modeling strategies to handle different modalities (text and images) in the dataset instances.

Offering a promising solution to the scalability challenges associated with human evaluation, the LLM-as-a-judge paradigm is rapidly gaining traction as an approach to evaluating large language models (LLMs). However, there are still many open questions about the strengths and weaknesses of this paradigm, and what potential biases it may hold. In this paper, we present a comprehensive study of the performance of various LLMs acting as judges. We leverage TriviaQA as a benchmark for assessing objective knowledge reasoning of LLMs and evaluate them alongside human annotations which we found to have a high inter-annotator agreement. Our study includes 9 judge models and 9 exam taker models -- both base and instruction-tuned. We assess the judge model's alignment across different model sizes, families, and judge prompts. Among other results, our research rediscovers the importance of using Cohen's kappa as a metric of alignment as opposed to simple percent agreement, showing that judges with high percent agreement can still assign vastly different scores. We find that both Llama-3 70B and GPT-4 Turbo have an excellent alignment with humans, but in terms of ranking exam taker models, they are outperformed by both JudgeLM-7B and the lexical judge Contains, which have up to 34 points lower human alignment. Through error analysis and various other studies, including the effects of instruction length and leniency bias, we hope to provide valuable lessons for using LLMs as judges in the future.

We provide here a dataset for tasks related to natural language understanding and natural language inference. The dataset contains logical puzzles in natural language from three domains: comparing puzzles, knighs and knaves, and zebra puzzles. Each puzzle is associated with the entire set of atomic questions that can be generated based on the relations and individuals occurring in the text. For each question we provide the correct answer: entailment, contradiction or ambiguity. The answer's correctness is verified against theorem provers. Good puzzles have two properties: (i) each piece of information is necessary and (ii) no unnecessary information is provided. These properties make puzzles interesting candidates for machine comprehension tasks.

Current LLM training positions mathematical reasoning as a core capability. With publicly available sources fully tapped, there is unmet demand for diverse and challenging math questions. Relying solely on human experts is both time-consuming and costly, while LLM-generated questions often lack the requisite diversity and difficulty. We present a design framework that combines the strengths of LLMs with a human-in-the-loop approach to generate a diverse array of challenging math questions. We leverage LLM metacognition skills [Didolkar et al., 2024] of a strong LLM to extract core "skills" from existing math datasets. These skills serve as the basis for generating novel and difficult questions by prompting the LLM with random pairs of core skills. The use of two different skills within each question makes finding such questions an "out of distribution" task for both LLMs and humans. Our pipeline employs LLMs to iteratively generate and refine questions and solutions through multiturn prompting. Human annotators then verify and further refine the questions, with their efficiency enhanced via further LLM interactions. Applying this pipeline on skills extracted from the MATH dataset [Hendrycks et al., 2021] resulted in MATH^2 - a dataset of higher-quality math questions, as evidenced by: (a) Lower performance of all models on MATH^2 than on MATH (b) Higher performance on MATH when using MATH^2 questions as in-context examples. Although focused on mathematics, our methodology seems applicable to other domains requiring structured reasoning, and potentially as a component of scalable oversight. Also of interest is a striking relationship observed between models' performance on the new dataset: the success rate on MATH^2 is the square on MATH, suggesting that successfully solving the question in MATH^2 requires a nontrivial combination of two distinct math skills.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated solid zero-shot reasoning capabilities, which is reflected in their performance on the current test tasks. This calls for a more challenging benchmark requiring highly advanced reasoning ability to be solved. In this paper, we introduce such a benchmark, consisting of 191 long-form (1200 words on average) mystery narratives constructed as detective puzzles. Puzzles are sourced from the "5 Minute Mystery" platform and include a multiple-choice question for evaluation. Only 47% of humans solve a puzzle successfully on average, while the best human solvers achieve over 80% success rate. We show that GPT-3 models barely outperform random on this benchmark (with 28% accuracy) while state-of-the-art GPT-4 solves only 38% of puzzles. This indicates that there is still a significant gap in the deep reasoning abilities of LLMs and humans and highlights the need for further research in this area. Our work introduces a challenging benchmark for future studies on reasoning in language models and contributes to a better understanding of the limits of LLMs' abilities.

This paper presents our submission to the SemEval 2024 Task 5: The Legal Argument Reasoning Task in Civil Procedure. We present two approaches to solving the task of legal answer validation, given an introduction to the case, a question and an answer candidate. Firstly, we fine-tuned pre-trained BERT-based models and found that models trained on domain knowledge perform better. Secondly, we performed few-shot prompting on GPT models and found that reformulating the answer validation task to be a multiple-choice QA task remarkably improves the performance of the model. Our best submission is a BERT-based model that achieved the 7th place out of 20.

We consider the problem of Recognizing Textual Entailment within an Information Retrieval context, where we must simultaneously determine the relevancy as well as degree of entailment for individual pieces of evidence to determine a yes/no answer to a binary natural language question. We compare several variants of neural networks for sentence embeddings in a setting of decision-making based on evidence of varying relevance. We propose a basic model to integrate evidence for entailment, show that joint training of the sentence embeddings to model relevance and entailment is feasible even with no explicit per-evidence supervision, and show the importance of evaluating strong baselines. We also demonstrate the benefit of carrying over text comprehension model trained on an unrelated task for our small datasets. Our research is motivated primarily by a new open dataset we introduce, consisting of binary questions and news-based evidence snippets. We also apply the proposed relevance-entailment model on a similar task of ranking multiple-choice test answers, evaluating it on a preliminary dataset of school test questions as well as the standard MCTest dataset, where we improve the neural model state-of-art.

Readers of academic research papers often read with the goal of answering specific questions. Question Answering systems that can answer those questions can make consumption of the content much more efficient. However, building such tools requires data that reflect the difficulty of the task arising from complex reasoning about claims made in multiple parts of a paper. In contrast, existing information-seeking question answering datasets usually contain questions about generic factoid-type information. We therefore present QASPER, a dataset of 5,049 questions over 1,585 Natural Language Processing papers. Each question is written by an NLP practitioner who read only the title and abstract of the corresponding paper, and the question seeks information present in the full text. The questions are then answered by a separate set of NLP practitioners who also provide supporting evidence to answers. We find that existing models that do well on other QA tasks do not perform well on answering these questions, underperforming humans by at least 27 F1 points when answering them from entire papers, motivating further research in document-grounded, information-seeking QA, which our dataset is designed to facilitate.

Despite significant advances in large language models (LLMs), their knowledge memorization capabilities remain underexplored, due to the lack of standardized and high-quality test ground. In this paper, we introduce a novel, real-world and large-scale knowledge injection benchmark that evolves continuously over time without requiring human intervention. Specifically, we propose WikiDYK, which leverages recently-added and human-written facts from Wikipedia's "Did You Know..." entries. These entries are carefully selected by expert Wikipedia editors based on criteria such as verifiability and clarity. Each entry is converted into multiple question-answer pairs spanning diverse task formats from easy cloze prompts to complex multi-hop questions. WikiDYK contains 12,290 facts and 77,180 questions, which is also seamlessly extensible with future updates from Wikipedia editors. Extensive experiments using continued pre-training reveal a surprising insight: despite their prevalence in modern LLMs, Causal Language Models (CLMs) demonstrate significantly weaker knowledge memorization capabilities compared to Bidirectional Language Models (BiLMs), exhibiting a 23% lower accuracy in terms of reliability. To compensate for the smaller scales of current BiLMs, we introduce a modular collaborative framework utilizing ensembles of BiLMs as external knowledge repositories to integrate with LLMs. Experiment shows that our framework further improves the reliability accuracy by up to 29.1%.

The game show Lucky 13 differs from other television game shows in that contestants are required to place a bet on their own knowledge of trivia by selecting a range that contains the number of questions that they answered correctly. We present a model for this game show using binomial random variables and generate tables outlining the optimal range the player should select based on maximization of two different utility functions. After analyzing the decisions made by some actual contestants on this show, we present a numerical simulation for how many questions an average player is expected to answer correctly based on question categories observed for two sample contestants.

When large language models (LMs) are applied in zero- or few-shot settings to discriminative tasks such as multiple-choice questions, their attentiveness (i.e., probability mass) is spread across many vocabulary tokens that are not valid choices. Such a spread across multiple surface forms with identical meaning is thought to cause an underestimation of a model's true performance, referred to as the "surface form competition" (SFC) hypothesis. This has motivated the introduction of various probability normalization methods. However, many core questions remain unanswered. How do we measure SFC or attentiveness? Are there direct ways of increasing attentiveness on valid choices? Does increasing attentiveness always improve task accuracy? We propose a mathematical formalism for studying this phenomenon, provide a metric for quantifying attentiveness, and identify a simple method for increasing it -- namely, in-context learning with even just one example containing answer choices. The formalism allows us to quantify SFC and bound its impact. Our experiments on three diverse datasets and six LMs reveal several surprising findings. For example, encouraging models to generate a valid answer choice can, in fact, be detrimental to task performance for some LMs, and prior probability normalization methods are less effective (sometimes even detrimental) to instruction-tuned LMs. We conclude with practical insights for effectively using prompted LMs for multiple-choice tasks.

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.

Recent studies show that large language models (LLMs) can be instructed to effectively perform zero-shot passage re-ranking, in which the results of a first stage retrieval method, such as BM25, are rated and reordered to improve relevance. In this work, we improve LLM-based re-ranking by algorithmically selecting few-shot demonstrations to include in the prompt. Our analysis investigates the conditions where demonstrations are most helpful, and shows that adding even one demonstration is significantly beneficial. We propose a novel demonstration selection strategy based on difficulty rather than the commonly used semantic similarity. Furthermore, we find that demonstrations helpful for ranking are also effective at question generation. We hope our work will spur more principled research into question generation and passage ranking.

Reasoning quality in large language models depends not only on producing correct answers but also on generating valid intermediate steps. We study this through multiple-choice question answering (MCQA), which provides a controlled setting with fixed answer options. Our analysis shows that when questions are effectively unsolvable for a model, spurious chains of thought (CoTs) are more likely to appear, leading to false positives. By estimating the solvability of each question, we uncover an intermediate regime where learning is most effective. Building on this insight, we adapt outcome-supervised reward models and reinforcement learning with group-relative advantage to incorporate solvability into their objectives. Across experiments on math and multimodal datasets, these modifications consistently yield higher rates of process-correct reasoning and, in reinforcement learning, improved answer accuracy as well. Our results highlight solvability as a key factor for reducing hallucinations and increasing reliability in CoT reasoning.

Eleven Large Language Models (LLMs) were assessed using a custom-made battery of false-belief tasks, considered a gold standard in testing Theory of Mind (ToM) in humans. The battery included 640 prompts spread across 40 diverse tasks, each one including a false-belief scenario, three closely matched true-belief control scenarios, and the reversed versions of all four. To solve a single task, a model needed to correctly answer 16 prompts across all eight scenarios. Smaller and older models solved no tasks; GPT-3-davinci-003 (from November 2022) and ChatGPT-3.5-turbo (from March 2023) solved 20% of the tasks; ChatGPT-4 (from June 2023) solved 75% of the tasks, matching the performance of six-year-old children observed in past studies. We explore the potential interpretation of these findings, including the intriguing possibility that ToM, previously considered exclusive to humans, may have spontaneously emerged as a byproduct of LLMs' improving language skills.

The paper introduces SceMQA, a novel benchmark for scientific multimodal question answering at the college entrance level. It addresses a critical educational phase often overlooked in existing benchmarks, spanning high school to pre-college levels. SceMQA focuses on core science subjects including Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry, and Biology. It features a blend of multiple-choice and free-response formats, ensuring a comprehensive evaluation of AI models' abilities. Additionally, our benchmark provides specific knowledge points for each problem and detailed explanations for each answer. SceMQA also uniquely presents problems with identical contexts but varied questions to facilitate a more thorough and accurate assessment of reasoning capabilities. In the experiment, we evaluate both open-source and close-source state-of-the-art Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), across various experimental settings. The results show that further research and development are needed in developing more capable MLLM, as highlighted by only 50% to 60% accuracy achieved by the strongest models. Our benchmark and analysis will be available at https://scemqa.github.io/

Multiple choice questions (MCQs) are commonly used to evaluate the capabilities of large language models (LLMs). One common way to evaluate the model response is to rank the candidate answers based on the log probability of the first token prediction. An alternative way is to examine the text output. Prior work has shown that first token probabilities lack robustness to changes in MCQ phrasing, and that first token probabilities do not match text answers for instruction-tuned models. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the robustness of text answers. We show that the text answers are more robust to question perturbations than the first token probabilities, when the first token answers mismatch the text answers. The difference in robustness increases as the mismatch rate becomes greater. As the mismatch reaches over 50\%, the text answer is more robust to option order changes than the debiased first token probabilities using state-of-the-art debiasing methods such as PriDe. Our findings provide further evidence for the benefits of text answer evaluation over first token probability evaluation.

We introduce a new reading comprehension dataset, dubbed MultiWikiQA, which covers 306 languages. The context data comes from Wikipedia articles, with questions generated by an LLM and the answers appearing verbatim in the Wikipedia articles. We conduct a crowdsourced human evaluation of the fluency of the generated questions across 30 of the languages, providing evidence that the questions are of good quality. We evaluate 6 different language models, both decoder and encoder models of varying sizes, showing that the benchmark is sufficiently difficult and that there is a large performance discrepancy amongst the languages. The dataset and survey evaluations are freely available.

Existing question answering (QA) datasets fail to train QA systems to perform complex reasoning and provide explanations for answers. We introduce HotpotQA, a new dataset with 113k Wikipedia-based question-answer pairs with four key features: (1) the questions require finding and reasoning over multiple supporting documents to answer; (2) the questions are diverse and not constrained to any pre-existing knowledge bases or knowledge schemas; (3) we provide sentence-level supporting facts required for reasoning, allowing QA systems to reason with strong supervision and explain the predictions; (4) we offer a new type of factoid comparison questions to test QA systems' ability to extract relevant facts and perform necessary comparison. We show that HotpotQA is challenging for the latest QA systems, and the supporting facts enable models to improve performance and make explainable predictions.

Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (It-LLMs) have been exhibiting outstanding abilities to reason around cognitive states, intentions, and reactions of all people involved, letting humans guide and comprehend day-to-day social interactions effectively. In fact, several multiple-choice questions (MCQ) benchmarks have been proposed to construct solid assessments of the models' abilities. However, earlier works are demonstrating the presence of inherent "order bias" in It-LLMs, posing challenges to the appropriate evaluation. In this paper, we investigate It-LLMs' resilience abilities towards a series of probing tests using four MCQ benchmarks. Introducing adversarial examples, we show a significant performance gap, mainly when varying the order of the choices, which reveals a selection bias and brings into discussion reasoning abilities. Following a correlation between first positions and model choices due to positional bias, we hypothesized the presence of structural heuristics in the decision-making process of the It-LLMs, strengthened by including significant examples in few-shot scenarios. Finally, by using the Chain-of-Thought (CoT) technique, we elicit the model to reason and mitigate the bias by obtaining more robust models.

We present a new kind of question answering dataset, OpenBookQA, modeled after open book exams for assessing human understanding of a subject. The open book that comes with our questions is a set of 1329 elementary level science facts. Roughly 6000 questions probe an understanding of these facts and their application to novel situations. This requires combining an open book fact (e.g., metals conduct electricity) with broad common knowledge (e.g., a suit of armor is made of metal) obtained from other sources. While existing QA datasets over documents or knowledge bases, being generally self-contained, focus on linguistic understanding, OpenBookQA probes a deeper understanding of both the topic---in the context of common knowledge---and the language it is expressed in. Human performance on OpenBookQA is close to 92%, but many state-of-the-art pre-trained QA methods perform surprisingly poorly, worse than several simple neural baselines we develop. Our oracle experiments designed to circumvent the knowledge retrieval bottleneck demonstrate the value of both the open book and additional facts. We leave it as a challenge to solve the retrieval problem in this multi-hop setting and to close the large gap to human performance.

In recent years, there have been significant breakthroughs in the field of natural language processing, particularly with the development of large language models (LLMs). These LLMs have showcased remarkable capabilities on various benchmarks. In the healthcare field, the exact role LLMs and other future AI models will play remains unclear. There is a potential for these models in the future to be used as part of adaptive physician training, medical co-pilot applications, and digital patient interaction scenarios. The ability of AI models to participate in medical training and patient care will depend in part on their mastery of the knowledge content of specific medical fields. This study investigated the medical knowledge capability of LLMs, specifically in the context of internal medicine subspecialty multiple-choice test-taking ability. We compared the performance of several open-source LLMs (Koala 7B, Falcon 7B, Stable-Vicuna 13B, and Orca Mini 13B), to GPT-4 and Claude 2 on multiple-choice questions in the field of Nephrology. Nephrology was chosen as an example of a particularly conceptually complex subspecialty field within internal medicine. The study was conducted to evaluate the ability of LLM models to provide correct answers to nephSAP (Nephrology Self-Assessment Program) multiple-choice questions. The overall success of open-sourced LLMs in answering the 858 nephSAP multiple-choice questions correctly was 17.1% - 25.5%. In contrast, Claude 2 answered 54.4% of the questions correctly, whereas GPT-4 achieved a score of 73.3%. We show that current widely used open-sourced LLMs do poorly in their ability for zero-shot reasoning when compared to GPT-4 and Claude 2. The findings of this study potentially have significant implications for the future of subspecialty medical training and patient care.

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.

Visual contents, such as illustrations and images, play a big role in product manual understanding. Existing Product Manual Question Answering (PMQA) datasets tend to ignore visual contents and only retain textual parts. In this work, to emphasize the importance of multimodal contents, we propose a Multimodal Product Manual Question Answering (MPMQA) task. For each question, MPMQA requires the model not only to process multimodal contents but also to provide multimodal answers. To support MPMQA, a large-scale dataset PM209 is constructed with human annotations, which contains 209 product manuals from 27 well-known consumer electronic brands. Human annotations include 6 types of semantic regions for manual contents and 22,021 pairs of question and answer. Especially, each answer consists of a textual sentence and related visual regions from manuals. Taking into account the length of product manuals and the fact that a question is always related to a small number of pages, MPMQA can be naturally split into two subtasks: retrieving most related pages and then generating multimodal answers. We further propose a unified model that can perform these two subtasks all together and achieve comparable performance with multiple task-specific models. The PM209 dataset is available at https://github.com/AIM3-RUC/MPMQA.

In this paper, we propose the task of consecutive question generation (CQG), which generates a set of logically related question-answer pairs to understand a whole passage, with a comprehensive consideration of the aspects including accuracy, coverage, and informativeness. To achieve this, we first examine the four key elements of CQG, i.e., question, answer, rationale, and context history, and propose a novel dynamic multitask framework with one main task generating a question-answer pair, and four auxiliary tasks generating other elements. It directly helps the model generate good questions through both joint training and self-reranking. At the same time, to fully explore the worth-asking information in a given passage, we make use of the reranking losses to sample the rationales and search for the best question series globally. Finally, we measure our strategy by QA data augmentation and manual evaluation, as well as a novel application of generated question-answer pairs on DocNLI. We prove that our strategy can improve question generation significantly and benefit multiple related NLP tasks.

We propose LogicVista, an evaluation benchmark that assesses the integrated logical reasoning capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) in Visual contexts. Recent advancements in MLLMs have demonstrated various fascinating abilities, from crafting poetry based on an image to performing mathematical reasoning. However, there is still a lack of systematic evaluation of MLLMs' proficiency in logical reasoning tasks, which are essential for activities like navigation and puzzle-solving. Thus we evaluate general logical cognition abilities across 5 logical reasoning tasks encompassing 9 different capabilities, using a sample of 448 multiple-choice questions. Each question is annotated with the correct answer and the human-written reasoning behind the selection, enabling both open-ended and multiple-choice evaluation. A total of 8 MLLMs are comprehensively evaluated using LogicVista. Code and Data Available at https://github.com/Yijia-Xiao/LogicVista.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) has emerged as a promising solution to mitigate the limitations of large language models (LLMs), such as hallucinations and outdated information. However, it remains unclear how LLMs handle knowledge conflicts arising from different augmented retrieved passages, especially when these passages originate from the same source and have equal trustworthiness. In this work, we conduct a comprehensive evaluation of LLM-generated answers to questions that have varying answers based on contradictory passages from Wikipedia, a dataset widely regarded as a high-quality pre-training resource for most LLMs. Specifically, we introduce WikiContradict, a benchmark consisting of 253 high-quality, human-annotated instances designed to assess LLM performance when augmented with retrieved passages containing real-world knowledge conflicts. We benchmark a diverse range of both closed and open-source LLMs under different QA scenarios, including RAG with a single passage, and RAG with 2 contradictory passages. Through rigorous human evaluations on a subset of WikiContradict instances involving 5 LLMs and over 3,500 judgements, we shed light on the behaviour and limitations of these models. For instance, when provided with two passages containing contradictory facts, all models struggle to generate answers that accurately reflect the conflicting nature of the context, especially for implicit conflicts requiring reasoning. Since human evaluation is costly, we also introduce an automated model that estimates LLM performance using a strong open-source language model, achieving an F-score of 0.8. Using this automated metric, we evaluate more than 1,500 answers from seven LLMs across all WikiContradict instances. To facilitate future work, we release WikiContradict on: https://ibm.biz/wikicontradict.

The evaluation of the problem-solving capability under incomplete information scenarios of Large Language Models (LLMs) is increasingly important, encompassing capabilities such as questioning, knowledge search, error detection, and path planning. Current research mainly focus on LLMs' problem-solving capability such as ``Twenty Questions''. However, these kinds of games do not require recognizing misleading cues which are necessary in the incomplete information scenario. Moreover, the existing game such as ``Who is undercover'' are highly subjective, making it challenging for evaluation. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a novel game named BrainKing based on the ``Who is undercover'' and ``Twenty Questions'' for evaluating LLM capabilities under incomplete information scenarios. It requires LLMs to identify target entities with limited yes-or-no questions and potential misleading answers. By setting up easy, medium, and hard difficulty modes, we comprehensively assess the performance of LLMs across various aspects. Our results reveal the capabilities and limitations of LLMs in BrainKing, providing significant insights of LLM problem-solving levels.

We present a Chain-of-Action (CoA) framework for multimodal and retrieval-augmented Question-Answering (QA). Compared to the literature, CoA overcomes two major challenges of current QA applications: (i) unfaithful hallucination that is inconsistent with real-time or domain facts and (ii) weak reasoning performance over compositional information. Our key contribution is a novel reasoning-retrieval mechanism that decomposes a complex question into a reasoning chain via systematic prompting and pre-designed actions. Methodologically, we propose three types of domain-adaptable `Plug-and-Play' actions for retrieving real-time information from heterogeneous sources. We also propose a multi-reference faith score (MRFS) to verify and resolve conflicts in the answers. Empirically, we exploit both public benchmarks and a Web3 case study to demonstrate the capability of CoA over other methods.

Retrieval-augmented language models are being increasingly tasked with subjective, contentious, and conflicting queries such as "is aspartame linked to cancer". To resolve these ambiguous queries, one must search through a large range of websites and consider "which, if any, of this evidence do I find convincing?". In this work, we study how LLMs answer this question. In particular, we construct ConflictingQA, a dataset that pairs controversial queries with a series of real-world evidence documents that contain different facts (e.g., quantitative results), argument styles (e.g., appeals to authority), and answers (Yes or No). We use this dataset to perform sensitivity and counterfactual analyses to explore which text features most affect LLM predictions. Overall, we find that current models rely heavily on the relevance of a website to the query, while largely ignoring stylistic features that humans find important such as whether a text contains scientific references or is written with a neutral tone. Taken together, these results highlight the importance of RAG corpus quality (e.g., the need to filter misinformation), and possibly even a shift in how LLMs are trained to better align with human judgements.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities in natural language understanding and generation, but the quality bar for medical and clinical applications is high. Today, attempts to assess models' clinical knowledge typically rely on automated evaluations on limited benchmarks. There is no standard to evaluate model predictions and reasoning across a breadth of tasks. To address this, we present MultiMedQA, a benchmark combining six existing open question answering datasets spanning professional medical exams, research, and consumer queries; and HealthSearchQA, a new free-response dataset of medical questions searched online. We propose a framework for human evaluation of model answers along multiple axes including factuality, precision, possible harm, and bias. In addition, we evaluate PaLM (a 540-billion parameter LLM) and its instruction-tuned variant, Flan-PaLM, on MultiMedQA. Using a combination of prompting strategies, Flan-PaLM achieves state-of-the-art accuracy on every MultiMedQA multiple-choice dataset (MedQA, MedMCQA, PubMedQA, MMLU clinical topics), including 67.6% accuracy on MedQA (US Medical License Exam questions), surpassing prior state-of-the-art by over 17%. However, human evaluation reveals key gaps in Flan-PaLM responses. To resolve this we introduce instruction prompt tuning, a parameter-efficient approach for aligning LLMs to new domains using a few exemplars. The resulting model, Med-PaLM, performs encouragingly, but remains inferior to clinicians. We show that comprehension, recall of knowledge, and medical reasoning improve with model scale and instruction prompt tuning, suggesting the potential utility of LLMs in medicine. Our human evaluations reveal important limitations of today's models, reinforcing the importance of both evaluation frameworks and method development in creating safe, helpful LLM models for clinical applications.

Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) are increasingly applied to scientific research, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably understand and reason over the multimodal complexity of papers. A central challenge lies in detecting and resolving inconsistencies across text, figures, tables, and equations, issues that are often subtle, domain-specific, and ultimately undermine clarity, reproducibility, and trust. Existing benchmarks overlook this issue, either isolating single modalities or relying on synthetic errors that fail to capture real-world complexity. We introduce PRISMM-Bench (Peer-Review-sourced Inconsistency Set for Multimodal Models), the first benchmark grounded in real reviewer-flagged inconsistencies in scientific papers. Through a multi-stage pipeline of review mining, LLM-assisted filtering and human verification, we curate 262 inconsistencies from 242 papers. Based on this set, we design three tasks, namely inconsistency identification, remedy and pair matching, which assess a model's capacity to detect, correct, and reason over inconsistencies across different modalities. Furthermore, to address the notorious problem of choice-only shortcuts in multiple-choice evaluation, where models exploit answer patterns without truly understanding the question, we further introduce structured JSON-based answer representations that minimize linguistic biases by reducing reliance on superficial stylistic cues. We benchmark 21 leading LMMs, including large open-weight models (GLM-4.5V 106B, InternVL3 78B) and proprietary models (Gemini 2.5 Pro, GPT-5 with high reasoning). Results reveal strikingly low performance (26.1-54.2%), underscoring the challenge of multimodal scientific reasoning and motivating progress towards trustworthy scientific assistants.

LLMs have demonstrated remarkable capability for understanding semantics, but they often struggle with understanding pragmatics. To demonstrate this fact, we release a Pragmatics Understanding Benchmark (PUB) dataset consisting of fourteen tasks in four pragmatics phenomena, namely, Implicature, Presupposition, Reference, and Deixis. We curated high-quality test sets for each task, consisting of Multiple Choice Question Answers (MCQA). PUB includes a total of 28k data points, 6.1k of which have been created by us, and the rest are adapted from existing datasets. We evaluated nine models varying in the number of parameters and type of training. Our study indicates that fine-tuning for instruction-following and chat significantly enhances the pragmatics capabilities of smaller language models. However, for larger models, the base versions perform comparably with their chat-adapted counterparts. Additionally, there is a noticeable performance gap between human capabilities and model capabilities. Furthermore, unlike the consistent performance of humans across various tasks, the models demonstrate variability in their proficiency, with performance levels fluctuating due to different hints and the complexities of tasks within the same dataset. Overall, the benchmark aims to provide a comprehensive evaluation of LLM's ability to handle real-world language tasks that require pragmatic reasoning.

We introduce a large scale MAchine Reading COmprehension dataset, which we name MS MARCO. The dataset comprises of 1,010,916 anonymized questions---sampled from Bing's search query logs---each with a human generated answer and 182,669 completely human rewritten generated answers. In addition, the dataset contains 8,841,823 passages---extracted from 3,563,535 web documents retrieved by Bing---that provide the information necessary for curating the natural language answers. A question in the MS MARCO dataset may have multiple answers or no answers at all. Using this dataset, we propose three different tasks with varying levels of difficulty: (i) predict if a question is answerable given a set of context passages, and extract and synthesize the answer as a human would (ii) generate a well-formed answer (if possible) based on the context passages that can be understood with the question and passage context, and finally (iii) rank a set of retrieved passages given a question. The size of the dataset and the fact that the questions are derived from real user search queries distinguishes MS MARCO from other well-known publicly available datasets for machine reading comprehension and question-answering. We believe that the scale and the real-world nature of this dataset makes it attractive for benchmarking machine reading comprehension and question-answering models.

This paper addresses the problem of generating questions from a given context and an answer, specifically focusing on questions that require multi-hop reasoning across an extended context. Previous studies have suggested that key phrase selection is essential for question generation (QG), yet it is still challenging to connect such disjointed phrases into meaningful questions, particularly for long context. To mitigate this issue, we propose MultiFactor, a novel QG framework based on multi-level content planning. Specifically, MultiFactor includes two components: FA-model, which simultaneously selects key phrases and generates full answers, and Q-model which takes the generated full answer as an additional input to generate questions. Here, full answer generation is introduced to connect the short answer with the selected key phrases, thus forming an answer-aware summary to facilitate QG. Both FA-model and Q-model are formalized as simple-yet-effective Phrase-Enhanced Transformers, our joint model for phrase selection and text generation. Experimental results show that our method outperforms strong baselines on two popular QG datasets. Our code is available at https://github.com/zeaver/MultiFactor.

In this work, we provide DZEN, a dataset of parallel Dzongkha and English test questions for Bhutanese middle and high school students. The over 5K questions in our collection span a variety of scientific topics and include factual, application, and reasoning-based questions. We use our parallel dataset to test a number of Large Language Models (LLMs) and find a significant performance difference between the models in English and Dzongkha. We also look at different prompting strategies and discover that Chain-of-Thought (CoT) prompting works well for reasoning questions but less well for factual ones. We also find that adding English translations enhances the precision of Dzongkha question responses. Our results point to exciting avenues for further study to improve LLM performance in Dzongkha and, more generally, in low-resource languages. We release the dataset at: https://github.com/kraritt/llm_dzongkha_evaluation.

We present GPQA, a challenging dataset of 448 multiple-choice questions written by domain experts in biology, physics, and chemistry. We ensure that the questions are high-quality and extremely difficult: experts who have or are pursuing PhDs in the corresponding domains reach 65% accuracy (74% when discounting clear mistakes the experts identified in retrospect), while highly skilled non-expert validators only reach 34% accuracy, despite spending on average over 30 minutes with unrestricted access to the web (i.e., the questions are "Google-proof"). The questions are also difficult for state-of-the-art AI systems, with our strongest GPT-4 based baseline achieving 39% accuracy. If we are to use future AI systems to help us answer very hard questions, for example, when developing new scientific knowledge, we need to develop scalable oversight methods that enable humans to supervise their outputs, which may be difficult even if the supervisors are themselves skilled and knowledgeable. The difficulty of GPQA both for skilled non-experts and frontier AI systems should enable realistic scalable oversight experiments, which we hope can help devise ways for human experts to reliably get truthful information from AI systems that surpass human capabilities.

Since the recent prosperity of Large Language Models (LLMs), there have been interleaved discussions regarding how to reduce hallucinations from LLM responses, how to increase the factuality of LLMs, and whether Knowledge Graphs (KGs), which store the world knowledge in a symbolic form, will be replaced with LLMs. In this paper, we try to answer these questions from a new angle: How knowledgeable are LLMs? To answer this question, we constructed Head-to-Tail, a benchmark that consists of 18K question-answer (QA) pairs regarding head, torso, and tail facts in terms of popularity. We designed an automated evaluation method and a set of metrics that closely approximate the knowledge an LLM confidently internalizes. Through a comprehensive evaluation of 14 publicly available LLMs, we show that existing LLMs are still far from being perfect in terms of their grasp of factual knowledge, especially for facts of torso-to-tail entities.

Developing questions that are pedagogically sound, relevant, and promote learning is a challenging and time-consuming task for educators. Modern-day large language models (LLMs) generate high-quality content across multiple domains, potentially helping educators to develop high-quality questions. Automated educational question generation (AEQG) is important in scaling online education catering to a diverse student population. Past attempts at AEQG have shown limited abilities to generate questions at higher cognitive levels. In this study, we examine the ability of five state-of-the-art LLMs of different sizes to generate diverse and high-quality questions of different cognitive levels, as defined by Bloom's taxonomy. We use advanced prompting techniques with varying complexity for AEQG. We conducted expert and LLM-based evaluations to assess the linguistic and pedagogical relevance and quality of the questions. Our findings suggest that LLms can generate relevant and high-quality educational questions of different cognitive levels when prompted with adequate information, although there is a significant variance in the performance of the five LLms considered. We also show that automated evaluation is not on par with human evaluation.

Multi-hop question answering (MHQA) requires a model to retrieve and integrate information from multiple passages to answer a complex question. Recent systems leverage the power of large language models and integrate evidence retrieval with reasoning prompts (e.g., chain-of-thought reasoning) for the MHQA task. However, the complexities in the question types (bridge v.s. comparison questions) and the reasoning types (sequential v.s. parallel reasonings) require more novel and fine-grained prompting methods to enhance the performance of MHQA under the zero-shot setting. In this paper, we propose STOC-TOT, a stochastic tree-of-thought reasoning prompting method with constrained decoding for MHQA and conduct a detailed comparison with other reasoning prompts on different question types and reasoning types. Specifically, we construct a tree-like reasoning structure by prompting the model to break down the original question into smaller sub-questions to form different reasoning paths. In addition, we prompt the model to provide a probability estimation for each reasoning path at each reasoning step. At answer time, we conduct constrained decoding on the model to generate more grounded answers and reduce hallucination. Experiments comparing STOC-TOT with two MHQA datasets and five large language models showed that our framework outperforms other reasoning prompts by a significant margin.

As LLMs have become capable of processing more complex types of inputs, researchers have recently studied how to efficiently and affordably process possibly arbitrarily long sequences. One effective approach is to use a FIFO memory to store keys and values of an attention sublayer from past chunks to allow subsequent queries to attend. However, this approach requires a large memory and/or takes into the consideration the specific LM architecture. Moreover, due to the causal nature between the key-values in prior context and the queries at present, this approach cannot be extended to bidirectional attention such as in an encoder-decoder or PrefixLM decoder-only architecture. In this paper, we propose to use eviction policies, such as LRA and LFA, to reduce the memory size and adapt to various architectures, and we also propose the Attendre layer, a wait-to-attend mechanism by retrieving the key-value memory (K/V memory) with evicted queries in the query memory (Q memory). As a first step, we evaluate this method in the context length extension setup using the TriviaQA reading comprehension task, and show the effectiveness of the approach.

We introduce WiCkeD, a simple method to increase the complexity of existing multiple-choice benchmarks by randomly replacing a choice with "None of the above", a method often used in educational tests. We show that WiCkeD can be automatically applied to any existing benchmark, making it more challenging. We apply WiCkeD to 6 popular benchmarks and use it to evaluate 18 open-weight LLMs. The performance of the models drops 12.1 points on average with respect to the original versions of the datasets. When using chain-of-thought on 3 MMLU datasets, the performance drop for the WiCkeD variant is similar to the one observed when using the LLMs directly, showing that WiCkeD is also challenging for models with enhanced reasoning abilities. WiCkeD also uncovers that some models are more sensitive to the extra reasoning required, providing additional information with respect to the original benchmarks. We relase our code and data at https://github.com/ahmedselhady/wicked-benchmarks.

Question answering (QA) models often rely on large-scale training datasets, which necessitates the development of a data generation framework to reduce the cost of manual annotations. Although several recent studies have aimed to generate synthetic questions with single-span answers, no study has been conducted on the creation of list questions with multiple, non-contiguous spans as answers. To address this gap, we propose LIQUID, an automated framework for generating list QA datasets from unlabeled corpora. We first convert a passage from Wikipedia or PubMed into a summary and extract named entities from the summarized text as candidate answers. This allows us to select answers that are semantically correlated in context and is, therefore, suitable for constructing list questions. We then create questions using an off-the-shelf question generator with the extracted entities and original passage. Finally, iterative filtering and answer expansion are performed to ensure the accuracy and completeness of the answers. Using our synthetic data, we significantly improve the performance of the previous best list QA models by exact-match F1 scores of 5.0 on MultiSpanQA, 1.9 on Quoref, and 2.8 averaged across three BioASQ benchmarks.

Unsupervised commonsense reasoning (UCR) is becoming increasingly popular as the construction of commonsense reasoning datasets is expensive, and they are inevitably limited in their scope. A popular approach to UCR is to fine-tune language models with external knowledge (e.g., knowledge graphs), but this usually requires a large number of training examples. In this paper, we propose to transform the downstream multiple choice question answering task into a simpler binary classification task by ranking all candidate answers according to their reasonableness. To this end, for training the model, we convert the knowledge graph triples into reasonable and unreasonable texts. Extensive experimental results show the effectiveness of our approach on various multiple choice question answering benchmarks. Furthermore, compared with existing UCR approaches using KGs, ours is less data hungry. Our code is available at https://github.com/probe2/BUCA.

We introduce KorMedMCQA, the first Korean multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) benchmark derived from Korean healthcare professional licensing examinations, covering from the year 2012 to year 2023. This dataset consists of a selection of questions from the license examinations for doctors, nurses, and pharmacists, featuring a diverse array of subjects. We conduct baseline experiments on various large language models, including proprietary/open-source, multilingual/Korean-additional pretrained, and clinical context pretrained models, highlighting the potential for further enhancements. We make our data publicly available on HuggingFace and provide a evaluation script via LM-Harness, inviting further exploration and advancement in Korean healthcare environments.

In this paper, we evaluate the ability of large language models (LLMs) to perform multiple choice symbol binding (MCSB) for multiple choice question answering (MCQA) tasks in zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot settings. We focus on Vietnamese, with fewer challenging MCQA datasets than in English. The two existing datasets, ViMMRC 1.0 and ViMMRC 2.0, focus on literature. Recent research in Vietnamese natural language processing (NLP) has focused on the Vietnamese National High School Graduation Examination (VNHSGE) from 2019 to 2023 to evaluate ChatGPT. However, these studies have mainly focused on how ChatGPT solves the VNHSGE step by step. We aim to create a novel and high-quality dataset by providing structured guidelines for typing LaTeX formulas for mathematics, physics, chemistry, and biology. This dataset can be used to evaluate the MCSB ability of LLMs and smaller language models (LMs) because it is typed in a strict LaTeX style. We focus on predicting the character (A, B, C, or D) that is the most likely answer to a question, given the context of the question. Our evaluation of six well-known LLMs, namely BLOOMZ-7.1B-MT, LLaMA-2-7B, LLaMA-2-70B, GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and GPT-4.0, on the ViMMRC 1.0 and ViMMRC 2.0 benchmarks and our proposed dataset shows promising results on the MCSB ability of LLMs for Vietnamese. The dataset is available for research purposes only.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in question answering (QA) tasks. However, Multi-Answer Question Answering (MAQA), where a question may have several valid answers, remains challenging. Traditional QA settings often assume consistency across evidences, but MAQA can involve conflicting answers. Constructing datasets that reflect such conflicts is costly and labor-intensive, while existing benchmarks often rely on synthetic data, restrict the task to yes/no questions, or apply unverified automated annotation. To advance research in this area, we extend the conflict-aware MAQA setting to require models not only to identify all valid answers, but also to detect specific conflicting answer pairs, if any. To support this task, we introduce a novel cost-effective methodology for leveraging fact-checking datasets to construct NATCONFQA, a new benchmark for realistic, conflict-aware MAQA, enriched with detailed conflict labels, for all answer pairs. We evaluate eight high-end LLMs on NATCONFQA, revealing their fragility in handling various types of conflicts and the flawed strategies they employ to resolve them.

Despite the renewed interest in zero-shot visual classification due to the rise of Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs), the problem of evaluating free-form responses of auto-regressive models remains a persistent challenge. Most existing works focus on language-only tasks or don't consider Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) beyond 5-way options, both of which are critical capabilities to solve tasks in Fine-Grained Visual Classification (FGVC) where choice counts are in the hundreds to thousands and the choices are highly related. Furthermore, in this highly multi-way MCQ setting it is not clear how to extend LLM choice extraction to retrieval-based problems, where computing probabilities over the choice set is computationally costly. In this work we investigate nlg2choice, a simple two-stage method which first asks the MLLM an open-ended question for the task with minimal constraints, then uses text-only constrained decoding to predict the most likely choice. In retrieval settings, we compute the probability of the constrained response taking that choice with an early stopping method to significantly improve throughput. Our results show improvement over a suite of seven fine-grained visual datasets when evaluating in terms of classification and retrieval, and show that this performance holds over the various ways that users of LLMs can implement tasks in natural language.

Nearly all jurisdictions in the United States require a professional license exam, commonly referred to as "the Bar Exam," as a precondition for law practice. To even sit for the exam, most jurisdictions require that an applicant completes at least seven years of post-secondary education, including three years at an accredited law school. In addition, most test-takers also undergo weeks to months of further, exam-specific preparation. Despite this significant investment of time and capital, approximately one in five test-takers still score under the rate required to pass the exam on their first try. In the face of a complex task that requires such depth of knowledge, what, then, should we expect of the state of the art in "AI?" In this research, we document our experimental evaluation of the performance of OpenAI's `text-davinci-003` model, often-referred to as GPT-3.5, on the multistate multiple choice (MBE) section of the exam. While we find no benefit in fine-tuning over GPT-3.5's zero-shot performance at the scale of our training data, we do find that hyperparameter optimization and prompt engineering positively impacted GPT-3.5's zero-shot performance. For best prompt and parameters, GPT-3.5 achieves a headline correct rate of 50.3% on a complete NCBE MBE practice exam, significantly in excess of the 25% baseline guessing rate, and performs at a passing rate for both Evidence and Torts. GPT-3.5's ranking of responses is also highly-correlated with correctness; its top two and top three choices are correct 71% and 88% of the time, respectively, indicating very strong non-entailment performance. While our ability to interpret these results is limited by nascent scientific understanding of LLMs and the proprietary nature of GPT, we believe that these results strongly suggest that an LLM will pass the MBE component of the Bar Exam in the near future.

Question generation (QG) from a given context can enhance comprehension, engagement, assessment, and overall efficacy in learning or conversational environments. Despite recent advancements in QG, the challenge of enhancing or measuring the diversity of generated questions often remains unaddressed. In this paper, we introduce a multi-question generation model (mQG), which is capable of generating multiple, diverse, and answerable questions by focusing on context and questions. To validate the answerability of the generated questions, we employ a SQuAD2.0 fine-tuned question answering model, classifying the questions as answerable or not. We train and evaluate mQG on the FairytaleQA dataset, a well-structured QA dataset based on storybooks, with narrative questions. We further apply a zero-shot adaptation on the TellMeWhy and SQuAD1.1 datasets. mQG shows promising results across various evaluation metrics, among strong baselines.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities across various applications, fundamentally reshaping the landscape of natural language processing (NLP) research. However, recent evaluation frameworks often rely on the output probabilities of LLMs for predictions, primarily due to computational constraints, diverging from real-world LLM usage scenarios. While widely employed, the efficacy of these probability-based evaluation strategies remains an open research question. This study aims to scrutinize the validity of such probability-based evaluation methods within the context of using LLMs for Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs), highlighting their inherent limitations. Our empirical investigation reveals that the prevalent probability-based evaluation method inadequately aligns with generation-based prediction. Furthermore, current evaluation frameworks typically assess LLMs through predictive tasks based on output probabilities rather than directly generating responses, owing to computational limitations. We illustrate that these probability-based approaches do not effectively correspond with generative predictions. The outcomes of our study can enhance the understanding of LLM evaluation methodologies and provide insights for future research in this domain.

Making analogies is fundamental to cognition. Proportional analogies, which consist of four terms, are often used to assess linguistic and cognitive abilities. For instance, completing analogies like "Oxygen is to Gas as <blank> is to <blank>" requires identifying the semantic relationship (e.g., "type of") between the first pair of terms ("Oxygen" and "Gas") and finding a second pair that shares the same relationship (e.g., "Aluminum" and "Metal"). In this work, we introduce a 15K Multiple-Choice Question Answering (MCQA) dataset for proportional analogy completion and evaluate the performance of contemporary Large Language Models (LLMs) in various knowledge-enhanced prompt settings. Specifically, we augment prompts with three types of knowledge: exemplar, structured, and targeted. Our results show that despite extensive training data, solving proportional analogies remains challenging for current LLMs, with the best model achieving an accuracy of 55%. Notably, we find that providing targeted knowledge can better assist models in completing proportional analogies compared to providing exemplars or collections of structured knowledge.

The New York Times Connections game has emerged as a popular and challenging pursuit for word puzzle enthusiasts. We collect 438 Connections games to evaluate the performance of state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) against expert and novice human players. Our results show that even the best performing LLM, Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which has otherwise shown impressive reasoning abilities on a wide variety of benchmarks, can only fully solve 18% of the games. Novice and expert players perform better than Claude 3.5 Sonnet, with expert human players significantly outperforming it. We create a taxonomy of the knowledge types required to successfully cluster and categorize words in the Connections game. We find that while LLMs perform relatively well on categorizing words based on semantic relations they struggle with other types of knowledge such as Encyclopedic Knowledge, Multiword Expressions or knowledge that combines both Word Form and Meaning. Our results establish the New York Times Connections game as a challenging benchmark for evaluating abstract reasoning capabilities in AI systems.

Retrieval augmented generation (RAG) with large language models (LLMs) for Question Answering (QA) entails furnishing relevant context within the prompt to facilitate the LLM in answer generation. During the generation, inaccuracies or hallucinations frequently occur due to two primary factors: inadequate or distracting context in the prompts, and the inability of LLMs to effectively reason through the facts. In this paper, we investigate whether providing aligned context via a carefully selected passage sequence leads to better answer generation by the LLM for multi-hop QA. We introduce, "GenSco", a novel approach of selecting passages based on the predicted decomposition of the multi-hop questions}. The framework consists of two distinct LLMs: (i) Generator LLM, which is used for question decomposition and final answer generation; (ii) an auxiliary open-sourced LLM, used as the scorer, to semantically guide the Generator for passage selection. The generator is invoked only once for the answer generation, resulting in a cost-effective and efficient approach. We evaluate on three broadly established multi-hop question answering datasets: 2WikiMultiHop, Adversarial HotPotQA and MuSiQue and achieve an absolute gain of 15.1 and 5.9 points in Exact Match score with respect to the best performing baselines over MuSiQue and 2WikiMultiHop respectively.

Scientific literature is typically dense, requiring significant background knowledge and deep comprehension for effective engagement. We introduce SciDQA, a new dataset for reading comprehension that challenges LLMs for a deep understanding of scientific articles, consisting of 2,937 QA pairs. Unlike other scientific QA datasets, SciDQA sources questions from peer reviews by domain experts and answers by paper authors, ensuring a thorough examination of the literature. We enhance the dataset's quality through a process that carefully filters out lower quality questions, decontextualizes the content, tracks the source document across different versions, and incorporates a bibliography for multi-document question-answering. Questions in SciDQA necessitate reasoning across figures, tables, equations, appendices, and supplementary materials, and require multi-document reasoning. We evaluate several open-source and proprietary LLMs across various configurations to explore their capabilities in generating relevant and factual responses. Our comprehensive evaluation, based on metrics for surface-level similarity and LLM judgements, highlights notable performance discrepancies. SciDQA represents a rigorously curated, naturally derived scientific QA dataset, designed to facilitate research on complex scientific text understanding.

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly evaluated on single-answer multiple-choice tasks, yet many real-world problems require identifying all correct answers from a set of options. This capability remains underexplored. We introduce SATA-BENCH, the first dedicated benchmark for evaluating LLMs on Select All That Apply (SATA) questions across diverse domains, including reading comprehension, law, and biomedicine. Our evaluation of 27 open-source and proprietary models reveals a significant gap: even the strongest model achieves only 41.8% exact match, exposing LLMs' inability to reliably identify all correct answers. We find that this weakness stems from two core challenges: selection bias - models favor certain choices regardless of content, and count bias - models fail to predict the correct number of answers. To address these issues, we propose Choice Funnel, a decoding strategy that combines token debiasing with adaptive thresholding to guide models toward complete and accurate selections. Choice Funnel achieves up to 29% higher exact match than competitive baselines while reducing inference cost by over 64%. Our findings expose fundamental limitations in current LLMs and introduce a new framework for diagnosing and improving multi-answer reasoning. We release SATA-BENCH and Choice Funnel to promote LLM development for robust decision-making in realistic, multi-answer applications.

To answer one-to-many factual queries (e.g., listing cities of a country), a language model (LM) must simultaneously recall knowledge and avoid repeating previous answers. How are these two subtasks implemented and integrated internally? Across multiple datasets and models, we identify a promote-then-suppress mechanism: the model first recalls all answers, and then suppresses previously generated ones. Specifically, LMs use both the subject and previous answer tokens to perform knowledge recall, with attention propagating subject information and MLPs promoting the answers. Then, attention attends to and suppresses previous answer tokens, while MLPs amplify the suppression signal. Our mechanism is corroborated by extensive experimental evidence: in addition to using early decoding and causal tracing, we analyze how components use different tokens by introducing both Token Lens, which decodes aggregated attention updates from specified tokens, and a knockout method that analyzes changes in MLP outputs after removing attention to specified tokens. Overall, we provide new insights into how LMs' internal components interact with different input tokens to support complex factual recall. Code is available at https://github.com/Lorenayannnnn/how-lms-answer-one-to-many-factual-queries.

Most existing multi-hop datasets are extractive answer datasets, where the answers to the questions can be extracted directly from the provided context. This often leads models to use heuristics or shortcuts instead of performing true multi-hop reasoning. In this paper, we propose a new multi-hop dataset, MoreHopQA, which shifts from extractive to generative answers. Our dataset is created by utilizing three existing multi-hop datasets: HotpotQA, 2WikiMultihopQA, and MuSiQue. Instead of relying solely on factual reasoning, we enhance the existing multi-hop questions by adding another layer of questioning that involves one, two, or all three of the following types of reasoning: commonsense, arithmetic, and symbolic. Our dataset is created through a semi-automated process, resulting in a dataset with 1,118 samples that have undergone human verification. We then use our dataset to evaluate five different large language models: Mistral 7B, Gemma 7B, Llama 3 (8B and 70B), and GPT-4. We also design various cases to analyze the reasoning steps in the question-answering process. Our results show that models perform well on initial multi-hop questions but struggle with our extended questions, indicating that our dataset is more challenging than previous ones. Our analysis of question decomposition reveals that although models can correctly answer questions, only a portion - 38.7% for GPT-4 and 33.4% for Llama3-70B - achieve perfect reasoning, where all corresponding sub-questions are answered correctly. Evaluation code and data are available at https://github.com/Alab-NII/morehopqa

There has recently been considerable interest in incorporating information retrieval into large language models (LLMs). Retrieval from a dynamically expanding external corpus of text allows a model to incorporate current events and can be viewed as a form of episodic memory. Here we demonstrate that pre-processing the external corpus into semi-structured ''atomic facts'' makes retrieval more efficient. More specifically, we demonstrate that our particular form of atomic facts improves performance on various question answering tasks when the amount of retrieved text is limited. Limiting the amount of retrieval reduces the size of the context and improves inference efficiency.

In long-context question answering (LCQA), determining the optimal amount of context for a given query is a significant challenge. Including too few passages may omit critical information, while including too many can introduce noise and reduce the quality of the answer. Traditional approaches, such as fixed Top-K retrieval and single-stage reranking, face the dilemma of selecting the right number of passages. This problem is particularly pronounced for factoid questions, which often require only a few specific pieces of evidence. To address this issue, we introduce Context-Picker, a reasoning-aware framework that shifts the paradigm from similarity-based ranking to minimal sufficient subset selection. Context-Picker treats context selection as a decision-making process optimized via a human-inspired, two-stage reinforcement learning schedule: a recall-oriented stage that prioritizes the coverage of reasoning chains, followed by a precision-oriented stage that aggressively prunes redundancy to distill a compact evidence set. To resolve reward sparsity, we propose an offline evidence distillation pipeline that mines "minimal sufficient sets" via a Leave-One-Out (LOO) procedure, providing dense, task-aligned supervision. Experiments on five long-context and multi-hop QA benchmarks demonstrate that Context-Picker significantly outperforms strong RAG baselines, achieving superior answer accuracy with comparable or reduced context lengths. Ablation studies indicate that the coarse-to-fine optimization schedule, the redundancy-aware reward shaping, and the rationale-guided format all contribute substantially to these gains.

Multimodal LLMs are the natural evolution of LLMs, and enlarge their capabilities so as to work beyond the pure textual modality. As research is being carried out to design novel architectures and vision-and-language adapters, in this paper we concentrate on endowing such models with the capability of answering questions that require external knowledge. Our approach, termed Wiki-LLaVA, aims at integrating an external knowledge source of multimodal documents, which is accessed through a hierarchical retrieval pipeline. Relevant passages, using this approach, are retrieved from the external knowledge source and employed as additional context for the LLM, augmenting the effectiveness and precision of generated dialogues. We conduct extensive experiments on datasets tailored for visual question answering with external data and demonstrate the appropriateness of our approach.

This paper introduces a new suite of question answering datasets for Norwegian; NorOpenBookQA, NorCommonSenseQA, NorTruthfulQA, and NRK-Quiz-QA. The data covers a wide range of skills and knowledge domains, including world knowledge, commonsense reasoning, truthfulness, and knowledge about Norway. Covering both of the written standards of Norwegian - Bokm{\aa}l and Nynorsk - our datasets comprise over 10k question-answer pairs, created by native speakers. We detail our dataset creation approach and present the results of evaluating 11 language models (LMs) in zero- and few-shot regimes. Most LMs perform better in Bokm{\aa}l than Nynorsk, struggle most with commonsense reasoning, and are often untruthful in generating answers to questions. All our datasets and annotation materials are publicly available.

Large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have revealed amazing intelligence. How to evaluate the question-solving abilities of LLMs and their degrees of intelligence is a hot-spot but challenging issue. First, the question-solving abilities are interlaced with different ability branches like understanding and massive knowledge categories like mathematics. Second, the inputs of questions are multimodal that may involve text and images. Third, the response format of LLMs is diverse and thus poses great challenges for result extraction and evaluation. In this paper, we propose AGIBench -- a multi-granularity, multimodal, human-referenced, and auto-scoring benchmarking methodology for LLMs. Instead of a collection of blended questions, AGIBench focuses on three typical ability branches and adopts a four-tuple <ability branch, knowledge, difficulty, modal> to label the attributes of each question. First, it supports multi-granularity benchmarking, e.g., per-question, per-ability branch, per-knowledge, per-modal, per-dataset, and per-difficulty level granularities. Second, it contains multimodal input, including text and images. Third, it classifies all the questions into five degrees of difficulty according to the average accuracy rate of abundant educated humans (human-referenced). Fourth, it adopts zero-shot learning to avoid introducing additional unpredictability and provides an auto-scoring method to extract and judge the result. Finally, it defines multi-dimensional metrics, including accuracy under the average, worst, best, and majority voting cases, and repeatability. AGIBench is publically available from https://www.benchcouncil.org/agibench.

Recent advancements in Natural Language Processing (NLP) have impacted numerous sub-fields such as natural language generation, natural language inference, question answering, and more. However, in the field of question generation, the creation of distractors for multiple-choice questions (MCQ) remains a challenging task. In this work, we present a simple, generic framework for distractor generation using readily available Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs). Unlike previous methods, our framework relies solely on pre-trained language models and does not require additional training on specific datasets. Building upon previous research, we introduce a two-stage framework consisting of candidate generation and candidate selection. Our proposed distractor generation framework outperforms previous methods without the need for training or fine-tuning. Human evaluations confirm that our approach produces more effective and engaging distractors. The related codebase is publicly available at https://github.com/obss/disgem.

Large Language Models (LLMs) have garnered significant attention for their impressive general-purpose capabilities. For applications requiring intricate domain knowledge, Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) has shown a distinct advantage in incorporating domain-specific information into LLMs. However, existing RAG research has not fully addressed the challenges of Multiple Choice Question Answering (MCQA) in telecommunications, particularly in terms of retrieval quality and mitigating hallucinations. To tackle these challenges, we propose a novel first token probability guided RAG framework. This framework leverages confidence scores to optimize key hyperparameters, such as chunk number and chunk window size, while dynamically adjusting the context. Our method starts by retrieving the most relevant chunks and generates a single token as the potential answer. The probabilities of all options are then normalized to serve as confidence scores, which guide the dynamic adjustment of the context. By iteratively optimizing the hyperparameters based on these confidence scores, we can continuously improve RAG performance. We conducted experiments to validate the effectiveness of our framework, demonstrating its potential to enhance accuracy in domain-specific MCQA tasks.

The rise of powerful multimodal LLMs has enhanced the viability of building web agents which can, with increasing levels of autonomy, assist users to retrieve information and complete tasks on various human-computer interfaces. It is hence necessary to build challenging benchmarks that span a wide-variety of use cases reflecting real-world usage. In this work, we present WebQuest, a multi-page question-answering dataset that requires reasoning across multiple related web pages. In contrast to existing UI benchmarks that focus on multi-step web navigation and task completion, our dataset evaluates information extraction, multimodal retrieval and composition of information from many web pages. WebQuest includes three question categories: single-screen QA, multi-screen QA, and QA based on navigation traces. We evaluate leading proprietary multimodal models like GPT-4V, Gemini Flash, Claude 3, and open source models like InstructBLIP, PaliGemma on our dataset, revealing a significant gap between single-screen and multi-screen reasoning. Finally, we investigate inference time techniques like Chain-of-Thought prompting to improve model capabilities on multi-screen reasoning.

The increasing application of multi-modal large language models (MLLMs) across various sectors have spotlighted the essence of their output reliability and accuracy, particularly their ability to produce content grounded in factual information (e.g. common and domain-specific knowledge). In this work, we introduce SimpleVQA, the first comprehensive multi-modal benchmark to evaluate the factuality ability of MLLMs to answer natural language short questions. SimpleVQA is characterized by six key features: it covers multiple tasks and multiple scenarios, ensures high quality and challenging queries, maintains static and timeless reference answers, and is straightforward to evaluate. Our approach involves categorizing visual question-answering items into 9 different tasks around objective events or common knowledge and situating these within 9 topics. Rigorous quality control processes are implemented to guarantee high-quality, concise, and clear answers, facilitating evaluation with minimal variance via an LLM-as-a-judge scoring system. Using SimpleVQA, we perform a comprehensive assessment of leading 18 MLLMs and 8 text-only LLMs, delving into their image comprehension and text generation abilities by identifying and analyzing error cases.

It is challenging for current one-step retrieve-and-read question answering (QA) systems to answer questions like "Which novel by the author of 'Armada' will be adapted as a feature film by Steven Spielberg?" because the question seldom contains retrievable clues about the missing entity (here, the author). Answering such a question requires multi-hop reasoning where one must gather information about the missing entity (or facts) to proceed with further reasoning. We present GoldEn (Gold Entity) Retriever, which iterates between reading context and retrieving more supporting documents to answer open-domain multi-hop questions. Instead of using opaque and computationally expensive neural retrieval models, GoldEn Retriever generates natural language search queries given the question and available context, and leverages off-the-shelf information retrieval systems to query for missing entities. This allows GoldEn Retriever to scale up efficiently for open-domain multi-hop reasoning while maintaining interpretability. We evaluate GoldEn Retriever on the recently proposed open-domain multi-hop QA dataset, HotpotQA, and demonstrate that it outperforms the best previously published model despite not using pretrained language models such as BERT.