Dahua Lin


2024

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Turn Waste into Worth: Rectifying Top-k Router of MoE
Zhiyuan Zeng | Qipeng Guo | Zhaoye Fei | Zhangyue Yin | Yunhua Zhou | Linyang Li | Tianxiang Sun | Hang Yan | Dahua Lin | Xipeng Qiu
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Sparse Mixture of Experts (MoE) models are popular for training large language models due to their computational efficiency. However, the commonly used top-k routing mechanism suffers from redundancy computation and memory costs due to the unbalanced routing. Some experts are overflow, where the exceeding tokens are dropped. While some experts are empty, which are padded with zeros, negatively impacting model performance. To address the dropped tokens and padding, we propose the Rectify-Router, comprising the Intra-GPU Rectification and the Fill-in Rectification. The Intra-GPU Rectification handles dropped tokens, efficiently routing them to experts within the GPU where they are located to avoid inter-GPU communication. The Fill-in Rectification addresses padding by replacing padding tokens with the tokens that have high routing scores. Our experimental results demonstrate that the Intra-GPU Rectification and the Fill-in Rectification effectively handle dropped tokens and padding, respectively. Furthermore, the combination of them achieves superior performance, surpassing the accuracy of the vanilla top-1 router by 4.7%.

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BotChat: Evaluating LLMs’ Capabilities of Having Multi-Turn Dialogues
Haodong Duan | Jueqi Wei | Chonghua Wang | Hongwei Liu | Yixiao Fang | Songyang Zhang | Dahua Lin | Kai Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024

In the realm of modern Large Language Models (LLMs), facilitating high-quality, multi-turn dialogues with humans represents a cornerstone feature. However, human-based evaluation of such a capability involves substantial manual effort. This study offers a formative assessment of current LLMs’ proficiency in emulating human-like, multi-turn conversations using an LLM-centric approach. The evaluation encompasses three key elements in the evaluation pipeline: utterance generation, evaluation protocol, and judgement, and we delve deeply into each aspect. GPT-4, both as an utterance generator and as a judge, exhibits exceptional performance. As a generator, GPT-4 crafts dialogues indistinguishable from human interactions in terms of style and flow. When judging, it shows a heightened alignment with human evaluative standards and consistency. Conversely, other LLMs face challenges in producing quality multi-turn dialogues, hindered by inadequate instruction-following abilities, a propensity for prolix utterances, and overall limited capabilities. Notably, generating extensive dialogues (e.g., spanning tens of turns) remains a formidable task for most LLMs, particularly in Chinese contexts. We hope that our work can serve as a valuable resource for evaluating the multi-turn chatting capabilities of LLMs. Related resources are available at https://github.com/open-compass/BotChat.

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SALAD-Bench: A Hierarchical and Comprehensive Safety Benchmark for Large Language Models
Lijun Li | Bowen Dong | Ruohui Wang | Xuhao Hu | Wangmeng Zuo | Dahua Lin | Yu Qiao | Jing Shao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

In the rapidly evolving landscape of Large Language Models (LLMs), ensuring robust safety measures is paramount. To meet this crucial need, we propose SALAD-Bench, a safety benchmark specifically designed for evaluating LLMs, attack, and defense methods. Distinguished by its breadth, SALAD-Bench transcends conventional benchmarks through its large scale, rich diversity, intricate taxonomy spanning three levels, and versatile functionalities.SALAD-Bench is crafted with a meticulous array of questions, from standard queries to complex ones enriched with attack, defense modifications and multiple-choice. To effectively manage the inherent complexity, we introduce an innovative evaluators: the LLM-based MD-Judge for QA pairs with a particular focus on attack-enhanced queries, ensuring a seamless, and reliable evaluation. Above components extend SALAD-Bench from standard LLM safety evaluation to both LLM attack and defense methods evaluation, ensuring the joint-purpose utility. Our extensive experiments shed light on the resilience of LLMs against emerging threats and the efficacy of contemporary defense tactics. Data and evaluator are released under https://github.com/OpenSafetyLab/SALAD-BENCH

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MathBench: Evaluating the Theory and Application Proficiency of LLMs with a Hierarchical Mathematics Benchmark
Hongwei Liu | Zilong Zheng | Yuxuan Qiao | Haodong Duan | Zhiwei Fei | Fengzhe Zhou | Wenwei Zhang | Songyang Zhang | Dahua Lin | Kai Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have showcased significant improvements in mathematics. However, traditional math benchmarks like GSM8k offer a unidimensional perspective, which fall short in providing a holistic assessment of the LLMs’ math capabilities. To address this gap, we introduce MathBench, a new benchmark that rigorously assesses the mathematical capabilities of large language models. MathBench spans a wide range of mathematical disciplines, offering a detailed evaluation of both theoretical understanding and practical problem-solving skills. The benchmark progresses through five distinct stages, from basic arithmetic to college mathematics, and is structured to evaluate models at various depths of knowledge. Each stage includes theoretical questions and application problems, allowing us to measure a model’s mathematical proficiency and its ability to apply concepts in practical scenarios. MathBench aims to enhance the evaluation of LLMs’ mathematical abilities, providing a nuanced view of their knowledge understanding levels and problem solving skills in a bilingual context.

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Identifying Semantic Induction Heads to Understand In-Context Learning
Jie Ren | Qipeng Guo | Hang Yan | Dongrui Liu | Quanshi Zhang | Xipeng Qiu | Dahua Lin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

Although large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance, the lack of transparency in their inference logic raises concerns about their trustworthiness. To gain a better understanding of LLMs, we conduct a detailed analysis of the operations of attention heads and aim to better understand the in-context learning of LLMs. Specifically, we investigate whether attention heads encode two types of relationships between tokens present in natural languages: the syntactic dependency parsed from sentences and the relation within knowledge graphs. We find that certain attention heads exhibit a pattern where, when attending to subject tokens, they recall object tokens and increase the output logits of those object tokens. More crucially, the formulation of such semantic induction heads has a close correlation with the emergence of the in-context learning ability of language models. The study of semantic attention heads advances our understanding of the intricate operations of attention heads in transformers, and further provides new insights into the in-context learning of LLMs.

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Agent-FLAN: Designing Data and Methods of Effective Agent Tuning for Large Language Models
Zehui Chen | Kuikun Liu | Qiuchen Wang | Wenwei Zhang | Jiangning Liu | Dahua Lin | Kai Chen | Feng Zhao
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

Open-sourced Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved great success in various NLP tasks, however, they are still far inferior to API-based models when acting as agents. How to integrate agent ability into general LLMs becomes a crucial and urgent problem.This paper first delivers three key observations: (1) the current agent training corpus is entangled with both formats following and agent reasoning, which significantly shifts from the distribution of its pre-training data; (2) LLMs exhibit different learning speeds on the capabilities required by agent tasks; and (3) current approaches have side-effects when improving agent abilities by introducing hallucinations. Based on the above findings, we propose Agent-FLAN to effectively Fine-tune LANguage models for Agents.Through careful decomposition and redesign of the training corpus, Agent-FLAN enables Llama2-7B to outperform prior best works by 3.5% across various agent evaluation datasets. With comprehensively constructed negative samples, Agent-FLAN greatly alleviates the hallucination issues based on our established evaluation benchmark. Besides, it consistently improves the agent capability of LLMs when scaling model sizes while slightly enhancing the general capability of LLMs. The code and models are available at https://github.com/InternLM/Agent-FLAN.

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Code Needs Comments: Enhancing Code LLMs with Comment Augmentation
Demin Song | Honglin Guo | Yunhua Zhou | Shuhao Xing | Yudong Wang | Zifan Song | Wenwei Zhang | Qipeng Guo | Hang Yan | Xipeng Qiu | Dahua Lin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

The programming skill is one crucial ability for Large Language Models (LLMs), necessitating a deep understanding of programming languages (PLs) and their correlation with natural languages (NLs). We examine the impact of pre-training data on code-focused LLMs’ performance by assessing the comment density as a measure of PL-NL alignment. Given the scarcity of code-comment aligned data in pre-training corpora, we introduce a novel data augmentation method that generates comments for existing code, coupled with a data filtering strategy that filters out code data poorly correlated with natural language. We conducted experiments on three code-focused LLMs and observed consistent improvements in performance on two widely-used programming skill benchmarks. Notably, the model trained on the augmented data outperformed both the model used for generating comments and the model further trained on the data without augmentation.

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Balanced Data Sampling for Language Model Training with Clustering
Yunfan Shao | Linyang Li | Zhaoye Fei | Hang Yan | Dahua Lin | Xipeng Qiu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2024

Data plays a fundamental role in the training of Large Language Models (LLMs). While attention has been paid to the collection and composition of datasets, determining the data sampling strategy in training remains an open question. Most LLMs are trained with a simple strategy, random sampling. However, this sampling strategy ignores the unbalanced nature of training data distribution, which can be sub-optimal. In this paper, we propose ClusterClip Sampling to balance the text distribution of training data for better model training. Specifically, ClusterClip Sampling utilizes data clustering to reflect the data distribution of the training set and balances the common samples and rare samples during training based on the cluster results. A repetition clip operation is introduced to mitigate the overfitting issue led by samples from certain clusters. Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of ClusterClip Sampling, which outperforms random sampling and other cluster-based sampling variants under various training datasets and large language models.

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ProSA: Assessing and Understanding the Prompt Sensitivity of LLMs
Jingming Zhuo | Songyang Zhang | Xinyu Fang | Haodong Duan | Dahua Lin | Kai Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive capabilities across various tasks, but their performance is highly sensitive to the prompts utilized. This variability poses challenges for accurate assessment and user satisfaction. Current research frequently overlooks instance-level prompt variations and their implications on subjective evaluations. To address these shortcomings, we introduce ProSA, a framework designed to evaluate and comprehend prompt sensitivity in LLMs. ProSA incorporates a novel sensitivity metric, PromptSensiScore, and leverages decoding confidence to elucidate underlying mechanisms. Our extensive study, spanning multiple tasks, uncovers that prompt sensitivity fluctuates across datasets and models, with larger models exhibiting enhanced robustness. We observe that few-shot examples can alleviate this sensitivity issue, and subjective evaluations are also susceptible to prompt sensitivities, particularly in complex, reasoning-oriented tasks. Furthermore, our findings indicate that higher model confidence correlates with increased prompt robustness. We believe this work will serve as a helpful tool in studying prompt sensitivity of LLMs. The project is released at: https://github.com/open-compass/ProSA.

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Scaling Behavior for Large Language Models regarding Numeral Systems: An Example using Pythia
Zhejian Zhou | JIayu Wang | Dahua Lin | Kai Chen
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

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LongWanjuan: Towards Systematic Measurement for Long Text Quality
Xiaoran Liu | Kai Lv | Qipeng Guo | Hang Yan | Conghui He | Xipeng Qiu | Dahua Lin
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

The quality of training data is crucial for enhancing the long-text capabilities of foundation models. Despite existing efforts to refine data quality through heuristic rules and evaluations based on data diversity and difficulty, there’s a lack of systematic approaches specifically tailored for assessing long texts. Addressing this gap, our work systematically measures the quality of long texts by evaluating three fundamental linguistic dimensions: coherence, cohesion, and complexity. Drawing inspiration from the aforementioned three dimensions, we introduce a suite of metrics designed to evaluate the quality of long texts, encompassing both statistical and pre-trained language model-based ones. Leveraging these metrics, we present LongWanjuan, a bilingual dataset specifically tailored to enhance the training of language models for long-text tasks with over 160B tokens. In LongWanjuan, we categorize long texts into holistic, aggregated, and chaotic types, enabling a detailed analysis of long-text quality. Furthermore, we devise a data mixture recipe that strategically balances different types of long texts within LongWanjuan, leading to significant improvements in model performance on long-text tasks.

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Ada-LEval: Evaluating long-context LLMs with length-adaptable benchmarks
Chonghua Wang | Haodong Duan | Songyang Zhang | Dahua Lin | Kai Chen
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Recently, the large language model (LLM) community has shown increasing interest in enhancing LLMs’ capability to handle extremely long documents. As various long-text techniques and model architectures emerge, the precise and detailed evaluation of models’ long-text capabilities has become increasingly important. Existing long-text evaluation benchmarks, such as L-Eval and LongBench, construct long-text test sets based on open-source datasets, focusing mainly on QA and summarization tasks. These datasets include test samples of varying lengths (from 2k to 32k+) entangled together, making it challenging to assess model capabilities across different length ranges. Moreover, they do not cover the ultralong settings (100k+ tokens) that the latest LLMs claim to achieve. In this paper, we introduce Ada-LEval, a length-adaptable benchmark for evaluating the long-context understanding of LLMs. Ada-LEval includes two challenging subsets, TSort and BestAnswer, which enable a more reliable evaluation of LLMs’ long context capabilities. These benchmarks support intricate manipulation of the length of test cases, and can easily produce text samples up to 128k tokens. We evaluate 4 state-of-the-art closed-source API models and 6 open-source models with Ada-LEval. The evaluation results demonstrate the limitations of current LLMs, especially in ultra-long-context settings. Our code is available at https://github.com/open-compass/Ada-LEval.

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Flames: Benchmarking Value Alignment of LLMs in Chinese
Kexin Huang | Xiangyang Liu | Qianyu Guo | Tianxiang Sun | Jiawei Sun | Yaru Wang | Zeyang Zhou | Yixu Wang | Yan Teng | Xipeng Qiu | Yingchun Wang | Dahua Lin
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)

The widespread adoption of large language models (LLMs) across various regions underscores the urgent need to evaluate their alignment with human values. Current benchmarks, however, fall short of effectively uncovering safety vulnerabilities in LLMs. Despite numerous models achieving high scores and ‘topping the chart’ in these evaluations, there is still a significant gap in LLMs’ deeper alignment with human values and achieving genuine harmlessness. To this end, this paper proposes a value alignment benchmark named Flames, which encompasses both common harmlessness principles and a unique morality dimension that integrates specific Chinese values such as harmony. Accordingly, we carefully design adversarial prompts that incorporate complex scenarios and jailbreaking methods, mostly with implicit malice. By prompting 17 mainstream LLMs, we obtain model responses and rigorously annotate them for detailed evaluation. Our findings indicate that all the evaluated LLMs demonstrate relatively poor performance on Flames, particularly in the safety and fairness dimensions. We also develop a lightweight specified scorer capable of scoring LLMs across multiple dimensions to efficiently evaluate new models on the benchmark. The complexity of Flames has far exceeded existing benchmarks, setting a new challenge for contemporary LLMs and highlighting the need for further alignment of LLMs. Our benchmark is publicly available at https://github.com/AIFlames/Flames.

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Navigating the OverKill in Large Language Models
Chenyu Shi | Xiao Wang | Qiming Ge | Songyang Gao | Xianjun Yang | Tao Gui | Qi Zhang | Xuanjing Huang | Xun Zhao | Dahua Lin
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Large language models are meticulously aligned to be both helpful and harmless. However, recent research points to a potential overkill which means models may refuse to answer benign queries. In this paper, we investigate the factors for overkill by exploring how models handle and determine the safety of queries. Our findings reveal the presence of shortcuts within models, leading to excessive attention to harmful words like ‘kill’ and prompts emphasizing safety will exacerbate overkill. Based on these insights, we introduce Self-Contrastive Decoding (Self-CD), a training-free and model-agnostic strategy, to alleviate this phenomenon. We first extract such excessive attention by amplifying the difference in the model’s output distributions when responding to system prompts that either include or omit an emphasis on safety. Then we determine the final next-token predictions by downplaying the excessive attention via contrastive decoding. Empirical results have indicated that our method has achieved an average reduction of the refusal rate by 20 % while having almost no impact on safety.

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ANAH: Analytical Annotation of Hallucinations in Large Language Models
Ziwei Ji | Yuzhe Gu | Wenwei Zhang | Chengqi Lyu | Dahua Lin | Kai Chen
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Reducing the ‘hallucination' problem of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for their wide applications. A comprehensive and fine-grained measurement of the hallucination is the first key step for the governance of this issue but is under-explored in the community.Thus, we present ANAH, a bilingual dataset that offers ANalytical Annotation of Hallucinations in LLMs within Generative Question Answering.Each answer sentence in our dataset undergoes rigorous annotation, involving the retrieval of a reference fragment, the judgment of the hallucination type, and the correction of hallucinated content. ANAH consists of ~12k sentence-level annotations for ~4.3k LLM responses covering over 700 topics, constructed by a human-in-the-loop pipeline.Thanks to the fine granularity of the hallucination annotations, we can quantitatively confirm that the hallucinations of LLMs progressively accumulate in the answer and use ANAH to train and evaluate hallucination annotators. We conduct extensive experiments on studying generative and discriminative annotators and show that, although current open-source LLMs have difficulties in fine-grained hallucination annotation, the generative annotator trained with ANAH can surpass all open-source LLMs and GPT-3.5, obtain performance competitive with GPT-4, and exhibits better generalization ability on unseen questions.

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F-Eval: Asssessing Fundamental Abilities with Refined Evaluation Methods
Yu Sun | Keyuchen Keyuchen | Shujie Wang | Peiji Li | Qipeng Guo | Hang Yan | Xipeng Qiu | Xuanjing Huang | Dahua Lin
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Large language models (LLMs) garner significant attention for their unprecedented performance, leading to an increasing number of researches evaluating LLMs. However, these evaluation benchmarks are limited to assessing the instruction-following capabilities, overlooking the fundamental abilities that emerge during the pre-training stage. Previous subjective evaluation methods mainly reply on scoring by API models. However, in the absence of references, large models have shown limited ability to discern subtle differences. To bridge the gap, we propose F-Eval, a bilingual evaluation benchmark to evaluate the fundamental abilities, including expression, commonsense and logic. The tasks in F-Eval include multi-choice objective tasks, open-ended objective tasks, reference-based subjective tasks and reference-free subjective tasks. For reference-free subjective tasks, we devise new evaluation methods, serving as alternatives to scoring by API models. We conduct evaluations on 13 advanced LLMs. Results show that our evaluation methods show higher correlation coefficients and larger distinction than other evaluators. Additionally, we discuss the influence of different model sizes, dimensions, and normalization methods. We anticipate that F-Eval will facilitate the study of LLMs’ fundamental abilities.

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T-Eval: Evaluating the Tool Utilization Capability of Large Language Models Step by Step
Zehui Chen | Weihua Du | Wenwei Zhang | Kuikun Liu | Jiangning Liu | Miao Zheng | Jingming Zhuo | Songyang Zhang | Dahua Lin | Kai Chen | Feng Zhao
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance on various NLP tasks and are augmented by tools for broader applications. Yet, how to evaluate and analyze the tool utilization capability of LLMs is still under-explored. In contrast to previous works that evaluate models holistically, we comprehensively decompose the tool utilization into multiple sub-processes, including instruction following, planning, reasoning, retrieval, understanding, and review. Based on that, we further introduce T-Eval to evaluate the tool-utilization capability step by step. T-Eval disentangles the tool utilization evaluation into several sub-domains along model capabilities, facilitating the inner understanding of both holistic and isolated competency of LLMs. We conduct extensive experiments on T-Eval and in-depth analysis of various LLMs. T-Eval not only exhibits consistency with the outcome-oriented evaluation but also provides a more fine-grained analysis of the capabilities of LLMs, providing a new perspective in LLM evaluation on tool-utilization ability. The benchmark will be available.

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Uncertainty Aware Learning for Language Model Alignment
Yikun Wang | Rui Zheng | Liang Ding | Qi Zhang | Dahua Lin | Dacheng Tao
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)

As instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs) evolve, aligning pretrained foundation models presents increasing challenges. Existing alignment strategies, which typically leverage diverse and high-quality data sources, often overlook the intrinsic uncertainty of tasks, learning all data samples equally. This may lead to suboptimal data efficiency and model performance. In response, we propose uncertainty-aware learning (UAL) to improve the model alignment of different task scenarios, by introducing the sample uncertainty (elicited from more capable LLMs). We implement UAL by a simple fashion – adaptively setting the label smoothing value of training according to the uncertainty of individual samples. Analysis shows that our UAL indeed facilitates better token clustering in the feature space, validating our hypothesis. Extensive experiments on widely used benchmarks demonstrate that our UAL significantly and consistently outperforms standard supervised fine-tuning. Notably, LLMs aligned in a mixed scenario have achieved an average improvement of 10.62% on high-entropy tasks (i.e., AlpacaEval leaderboard), and 1.81% on complex low-entropy tasks (i.e., MetaMath and GSM8K).

2023

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CLEVA: Chinese Language Models EVAluation Platform
Yanyang Li | Jianqiao Zhao | Duo Zheng | Zi-Yuan Hu | Zhi Chen | Xiaohui Su | Yongfeng Huang | Shijia Huang | Dahua Lin | Michael Lyu | Liwei Wang
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing: System Demonstrations

With the continuous emergence of Chinese Large Language Models (LLMs), how to evaluate a model’s capabilities has become an increasingly significant issue. The absence of a comprehensive Chinese benchmark that thoroughly assesses a model’s performance, the unstandardized and incomparable prompting procedure, and the prevalent risk of contamination pose major challenges in the current evaluation of Chinese LLMs. We present CLEVA, a user-friendly platform crafted to holistically evaluate Chinese LLMs. Our platform employs a standardized workflow to assess LLMs’ performance across various dimensions, regularly updating a competitive leaderboard. To alleviate contamination, CLEVA curates a significant proportion of new data and develops a sampling strategy that guarantees a unique subset for each leaderboard round. Empowered by an easy-to-use interface that requires just a few mouse clicks and a model API, users can conduct a thorough evaluation with minimal coding. Large-scale experiments featuring 23 Chinese LLMs have validated CLEVA’s efficacy.