Perceive the Passage of Time: A Systematic Evaluation of Large Language Model in Temporal Relativity

Shuang Chen, Yining Zheng, Shimin Li, Qinyuan Cheng, Xipeng Qiu


Abstract
Temporal perception is crucial for Large Language Models(LLMs) to effectively understand the world. However, current benchmarks primarily focus on temporal reasoning, falling short in understanding the temporal characteristics involving temporal perception, particularly in understanding temporal relativity. In this paper, we introduce TempBench, a comprehensive benchmark designed to evaluate the temporal-relative ability of LLMs. TempBench encompasses 4 distinct scenarios: Physiology, Psychology, Cognition and Mixture. We conduct an extensive experiments on GPT-4, a series of Llama and other popular LLMs. The experiment results demonstrate a significant performance gap between LLMs and humans in temporal-relative capability. Furthermore, the error types of temporal-relative ability in LLMs are proposed to thoroughly analyze the impact of multiple aspects and emphasize the associated challenges. We anticipate that TempBench will drive further advancements in enhancing the temporal-perceiving capabilities of L
Anthology ID:
2025.coling-main.554
Volume:
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
January
Year:
2025
Address:
Abu Dhabi, UAE
Editors:
Owen Rambow, Leo Wanner, Marianna Apidianaki, Hend Al-Khalifa, Barbara Di Eugenio, Steven Schockaert
Venue:
COLING
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
8304–8313
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.554/
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Cite (ACL):
Shuang Chen, Yining Zheng, Shimin Li, Qinyuan Cheng, and Xipeng Qiu. 2025. Perceive the Passage of Time: A Systematic Evaluation of Large Language Model in Temporal Relativity. In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 8304–8313, Abu Dhabi, UAE. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Perceive the Passage of Time: A Systematic Evaluation of Large Language Model in Temporal Relativity (Chen et al., COLING 2025)
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https://aclanthology.org/2025.coling-main.554.pdf