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author Biderman, Stella
Schoelkopf, Hailey
Sutawika, Lintang
Gao, Leo
Tow, Jonathan
Abbasi, Baber
Aji, Alham Fikri
Ammanamanchi, Pawan Sasanka
Black, Sidney
Clive, Jordan
DiPofi, Anthony
Etxaniz, Julen
Fattori, Benjamin
Forde, Jessica Zosa
Foster, Charles
Hsu, Jeffrey
Jaiswal, Mimansa
Lee, Wilson Y.
Li, Haonan
Lovering, Charles
Muennighoff, Niklas
Pavlick, Ellie
Phang, Jason
Skowron, Aviya
Tan, Samson
Tang, Xiangru
Wang, Kevin A.
Winata, Genta Indra
Yvon, François
Zou, Andy
author_facet Biderman, Stella
Schoelkopf, Hailey
Sutawika, Lintang
Gao, Leo
Tow, Jonathan
Abbasi, Baber
Aji, Alham Fikri
Ammanamanchi, Pawan Sasanka
Black, Sidney
Clive, Jordan
DiPofi, Anthony
Etxaniz, Julen
Fattori, Benjamin
Forde, Jessica Zosa
Foster, Charles
Hsu, Jeffrey
Jaiswal, Mimansa
Lee, Wilson Y.
Li, Haonan
Lovering, Charles
Muennighoff, Niklas
Pavlick, Ellie
Phang, Jason
Skowron, Aviya
Tan, Samson
Tang, Xiangru
Wang, Kevin A.
Winata, Genta Indra
Yvon, François
Zou, Andy
contents Reliable evaluation of language models (LMs) remains an open challenge. Re- searchers and engineers face methodological issues such as the sensitivity of models to evaluation setup, difficulty of proper comparisons across methods, and the lack of reproducibility and transparency. Evaluation difficulties are exacer- bated by the fracturing and siloing of information about conventions and common practices. In this paper we draw on three years of experience in evaluating large lan- guage models (LMs) as developers of the popular Language Model Evaluation Harness (lm-eval) (Gao et al., 2023) framework to provide guidance and lessons for the field moving forward. We document a variety of challenges faced by prac- titioners and provide concrete instances where these challenges or the absence of best practices have come into effect. We make recommendations to the field for improving evaluation rigor and confidence, and attempt to codify much of the tacit or folk knowledge surrounding LM evaluation, for a solid ground to move forward.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_14782
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Lessons from the Trenches on Reproducible Evaluation of Language Models
Biderman, Stella
Schoelkopf, Hailey
Sutawika, Lintang
Gao, Leo
Tow, Jonathan
Abbasi, Baber
Aji, Alham Fikri
Ammanamanchi, Pawan Sasanka
Black, Sidney
Clive, Jordan
DiPofi, Anthony
Etxaniz, Julen
Fattori, Benjamin
Forde, Jessica Zosa
Foster, Charles
Hsu, Jeffrey
Jaiswal, Mimansa
Lee, Wilson Y.
Li, Haonan
Lovering, Charles
Muennighoff, Niklas
Pavlick, Ellie
Phang, Jason
Skowron, Aviya
Tan, Samson
Tang, Xiangru
Wang, Kevin A.
Winata, Genta Indra
Yvon, François
Zou, Andy
Computation and Language
Reliable evaluation of language models (LMs) remains an open challenge. Re- searchers and engineers face methodological issues such as the sensitivity of models to evaluation setup, difficulty of proper comparisons across methods, and the lack of reproducibility and transparency. Evaluation difficulties are exacer- bated by the fracturing and siloing of information about conventions and common practices. In this paper we draw on three years of experience in evaluating large lan- guage models (LMs) as developers of the popular Language Model Evaluation Harness (lm-eval) (Gao et al., 2023) framework to provide guidance and lessons for the field moving forward. We document a variety of challenges faced by prac- titioners and provide concrete instances where these challenges or the absence of best practices have come into effect. We make recommendations to the field for improving evaluation rigor and confidence, and attempt to codify much of the tacit or folk knowledge surrounding LM evaluation, for a solid ground to move forward.
title Lessons from the Trenches on Reproducible Evaluation of Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.14782