@inproceedings{chizhov-etal-2026-benchmarks,
title = "Who Benchmarks the Benchmarks? Towards Comprehensive Evaluation of Commonsense Reasoning Benchmarks",
author = "Chizhov, Pavel and
Changalidis, Anton and
Kumar, Vishnu Prasad Vijaya and
Detrois, Yannick and
Nee, Mattia and
Langlais, Pierre-Carl and
Yamshchikov, Ivan P.",
editor = "Sousa-Silva, Rui and
Lopes Cardoso, Henrique and
Koponen, Maarit and
Pareja-Lora, Antonio",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Language Understanding in the Human-Machine Era ({LUHME} 2026)",
month = oct,
year = "2026",
address = "Budapest, Hungary",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2026.luhme-1.24/",
pages = "360--377",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-471-2",
abstract = "Commonsense reasoning is a key language model capability, as it is purportedly a prerequisite for many basic tasks, unlike specific factual knowledge. It is often measured with multiple-choice questions (MCQ) benchmarks, e.g. HellaSwag and PIQA. Some of these benchmarks, however, are outdated and contain numerous validity issues. We illustrate some typical validity issues with a case study on HellaSwag, one of the most popular and problematic benchmarks for commonsense reasoning. The issues we find range from basic ungrammaticality and numerous typos to misleading prompts or equally correct options. We show that if we remove question prompts or replace them with ``Lorem ipsum dolor...'', about 68{\%} of model predictions remain the same. We argue that this occurs due to inner flaws in the benchmark, not mere contamination that might be present in some models. Since benchmark scores are an essential part of model selection in both research and commercial applications, these validity issues can have severe consequences. Based on our findings, we propose BenCheck, a package for benchmark validity analysis that encapsulates the main checks performed in our case study and can be used to audit MCQ benchmarks. We apply these checks to other commonsense reasoning benchmarks."
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<abstract>Commonsense reasoning is a key language model capability, as it is purportedly a prerequisite for many basic tasks, unlike specific factual knowledge. It is often measured with multiple-choice questions (MCQ) benchmarks, e.g. HellaSwag and PIQA. Some of these benchmarks, however, are outdated and contain numerous validity issues. We illustrate some typical validity issues with a case study on HellaSwag, one of the most popular and problematic benchmarks for commonsense reasoning. The issues we find range from basic ungrammaticality and numerous typos to misleading prompts or equally correct options. We show that if we remove question prompts or replace them with “Lorem ipsum dolor...”, about 68% of model predictions remain the same. We argue that this occurs due to inner flaws in the benchmark, not mere contamination that might be present in some models. Since benchmark scores are an essential part of model selection in both research and commercial applications, these validity issues can have severe consequences. Based on our findings, we propose BenCheck, a package for benchmark validity analysis that encapsulates the main checks performed in our case study and can be used to audit MCQ benchmarks. We apply these checks to other commonsense reasoning benchmarks.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Who Benchmarks the Benchmarks? Towards Comprehensive Evaluation of Commonsense Reasoning Benchmarks
%A Chizhov, Pavel
%A Changalidis, Anton
%A Kumar, Vishnu Prasad Vijaya
%A Detrois, Yannick
%A Nee, Mattia
%A Langlais, Pierre-Carl
%A Yamshchikov, Ivan P.
%Y Sousa-Silva, Rui
%Y Lopes Cardoso, Henrique
%Y Koponen, Maarit
%Y Pareja-Lora, Antonio
%S Proceedings of the 3rd Workshop on Language Understanding in the Human-Machine Era (LUHME 2026)
%D 2026
%8 October
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Budapest, Hungary
%@ 979-8-89176-471-2
%F chizhov-etal-2026-benchmarks
%X Commonsense reasoning is a key language model capability, as it is purportedly a prerequisite for many basic tasks, unlike specific factual knowledge. It is often measured with multiple-choice questions (MCQ) benchmarks, e.g. HellaSwag and PIQA. Some of these benchmarks, however, are outdated and contain numerous validity issues. We illustrate some typical validity issues with a case study on HellaSwag, one of the most popular and problematic benchmarks for commonsense reasoning. The issues we find range from basic ungrammaticality and numerous typos to misleading prompts or equally correct options. We show that if we remove question prompts or replace them with “Lorem ipsum dolor...”, about 68% of model predictions remain the same. We argue that this occurs due to inner flaws in the benchmark, not mere contamination that might be present in some models. Since benchmark scores are an essential part of model selection in both research and commercial applications, these validity issues can have severe consequences. Based on our findings, we propose BenCheck, a package for benchmark validity analysis that encapsulates the main checks performed in our case study and can be used to audit MCQ benchmarks. We apply these checks to other commonsense reasoning benchmarks.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.luhme-1.24/
%P 360-377
Markdown (Informal)
[Who Benchmarks the Benchmarks? Towards Comprehensive Evaluation of Commonsense Reasoning Benchmarks](https://aclanthology.org/2026.luhme-1.24/) (Chizhov et al., LUHME 2026)
ACL