LMentry: A Language Model Benchmark of Elementary Language Tasks

Avia Efrat, Or Honovich, Omer Levy


Abstract
As the performance of large language models rapidly improves, benchmarks are getting larger and more complex as well. We present LMentry, a benchmark that avoids this “arms race” by focusing on a compact set of tasks that are trivial to humans, e.g. writing a sentence containing a specific word, identifying which words in a list belong to a specific category, or choosing which of two words is longer.LMentry is specifically designed to provide quick and interpretable insights into the capabilities and robustness of large language models. Our experiments reveal a wide variety of failure cases that, while immediately obvious to humans, pose a considerable challenge for large language models, including OpenAI’s latest 175B-parameter instruction-tuned model, TextDavinci002.LMentry complements contemporary evaluation approaches of large language models, providing a quick, automatic, and easy-to-run “unit test”, without resorting to large benchmark suites of complex tasks.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.666
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
10476–10501
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.666
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.666
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Avia Efrat, Or Honovich, and Omer Levy. 2023. LMentry: A Language Model Benchmark of Elementary Language Tasks. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 10476–10501, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LMentry: A Language Model Benchmark of Elementary Language Tasks (Efrat et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.666.pdf