Yining Lu

Yining Lu, Dixuan Wang, Tianjian Li et al.

As LLMs become increasingly prevalent, it is interesting to consider how ``creative'' these models can be. From cognitive science, creativity consists of at least two key characteristics: \emph{convergent} thinking (purposefulness to achieve a given goal) and \emph{divergent} thinking (adaptability to explore new environments or constraints) \citep{runco2003critical}. In this work, we introduce a framework for quantifying LLM creativity that incorporates the two design ingredients: (1) We introduce DENIAL PROMPTING which pushes LLMs to develop more creative solutions to a given problem by incrementally imposing new constraints on the previous solution, compelling LLMs to adopt new strategies. (2) We define NEOGAUGE, a metric that quantifies both convergent and divergent thinking in the generated creative responses by LLMs. We test the proposed framework on Codeforces problems, which serve as both a natural dataset for coding tasks and a collection of prior human solutions. We quantify NEOGAUGE for various proprietary and open-source models and find that even the most creative model, GPT-4, still falls short of demonstrating human-like creativity. We also experiment with advanced reasoning strategies (MCTS, self-correction, etc.) and observe no significant improvement in creativity. As a by-product of our analysis, we release NEOCODER dataset for reproducing our results on future models.

Xiao Ye, Andrew Wang, Jacob Choi et al.

Humans regularly engage in analogical thinking, relating personal experiences to current situations (X is analogous to Y because of Z). Analogical thinking allows humans to solve problems in creative ways, grasp difficult concepts, and articulate ideas more effectively. Can language models (LMs) do the same? To answer this question, we propose AnaloBench, a benchmark to determine analogical reasoning ability in LMs. Our benchmarking approach focuses on aspects of this ability that are common among humans: (i) recalling related experiences from a large amount of information, and (ii) applying analogical reasoning to complex and lengthy scenarios. We test a broad collection of proprietary models (e.g., GPT family, Claude V2) and open source models such as LLaMA2. As in prior results, scaling up LMs results in some performance boosts. Surprisingly, scale offers minimal gains when, (i) analogies involve lengthy scenarios, or (ii) recalling relevant scenarios from a large pool of information, a process analogous to finding a needle in a haystack. We hope these observations encourage further research in this field.

Zhaoyi Joey Hou, Bowei Alvin Zhang, Yining Lu et al.

Creativity is often seen as a hallmark of human intelligence. While large language models (LLMs) are increasingly perceived as producing creative text, there is still no holistic framework to evaluate their creativity across diverse scenarios. Existing evaluation methods remain fragmented, with dramatic variation across domains and tasks, largely due to differing definitions and measurements of creativity. Inspired by the hypothesis that creativity is not one fixed idea, we propose CreativityPrism, an evaluation analysis framework that decomposes creativity into three dimensions: quality, novelty, and diversity. CreativityPrism incorporates nine tasks, three domains, i.e., divergent thinking, creative writing, and logical reasoning, and twenty evaluation metrics, which measure each dimension in task-specific, unique ways. We evaluate 17 state-of-the-art (SoTA) proprietary and open-sourced LLMs on CreativityPrism and analyze the performance correlations among different metrics and task domains. Our results reveal a notable gap between proprietary and open-source models. Overall, model performance tends to be highly correlated across tasks within the same domain and less so across different domains. Among evaluation dimensions, diversity and quality metrics show strong correlations - models that perform well on one often excel on the other - whereas novelty exhibits much weaker correlation with either. These findings support our hypothesis that strong performance in one creativity task or dimension does not necessarily generalize to others, underscoring the need for a holistic evaluation of LLM creativity.

Yining Lu, Noah Ziems, Hy Dang et al.

Current research on the \textit{Decompose-Then-Verify} paradigm for evaluating the factuality of long-form text typically treats decomposition and verification in isolation, overlooking their interactions and potential misalignment. We find that existing decomposition policies, typically hand-crafted demonstrations, do not align well with downstream verifiers in terms of atomicity -- a novel metric quantifying information density -- leading to suboptimal verification results. We formulate finding the optimal decomposition policy for optimal verification as a bilevel optimization problem. To approximate a solution for this strongly NP-hard problem, we propose dynamic decomposition, a reinforcement learning framework that leverages verifier feedback to learn a policy for dynamically decomposing claims to verifier-preferred atomicity. Experimental results show that dynamic decomposition outperforms existing decomposition policies, improving verification confidence by 0.07 and accuracy by 0.12 (on a 0-1 scale) on average across varying verifiers, datasets, and atomcities of input claims.