GAOKAO-Eval: Does high scores truly reflect strong capabilities in LLMs?
This addresses the issue of misleading LLM evaluations for researchers and developers, showing that current benchmarks may not capture true capabilities, though it is incremental as it builds on existing concerns about data leakage.
The paper tackles the problem of whether high benchmark scores truly reflect strong capabilities in large language models (LLMs) by creating GAOKAO-Eval, a benchmark based on China's Gaokao exam, and finds that even after addressing data leakage, high scores fail to reflect human-aligned capabilities, with analysis revealing discrepancies like anomalous performance across question difficulties and high variance.
Large Language Models (LLMs) are commonly evaluated using human-crafted benchmarks, under the premise that higher scores implicitly reflect stronger human-like performance. However, there is growing concern that LLMs may ``game" these benchmarks due to data leakage, achieving high scores while struggling with tasks simple for humans. To substantively address the problem, we create GAOKAO-Eval, a comprehensive benchmark based on China's National College Entrance Examination (Gaokao), and conduct ``closed-book" evaluations for representative models released prior to Gaokao. Contrary to prevailing consensus, even after addressing data leakage and comprehensiveness, GAOKAO-Eval reveals that high scores still fail to truly reflect human-aligned capabilities. To better understand this mismatch, We introduce the Rasch model from cognitive psychology to analyze LLM scoring patterns and identify two key discrepancies: 1) anomalous consistent performance across various question difficulties, and 2) high variance in performance on questions of similar difficulty. In addition, We identified inconsistent grading of LLM-generated answers among teachers and recurring mistake patterns. we find that the phenomenons are well-grounded in the motivations behind OpenAI o1, and o1's reasoning-as-difficulties can mitigate the mismatch. These results show that GAOKAO-Eval can reveal limitations in LLM capabilities not captured by current benchmarks and highlight the need for more LLM-aligned difficulty analysis.