Efficient multi-prompt evaluation of LLMs

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Polo, Felipe Maia, Xu, Ronald, Weber, Lucas, Silva, Mírian, Bhardwaj, Onkar, Choshen, Leshem, de Oliveira, Allysson Flavio Melo, Sun, Yuekai, Yurochkin, Mikhail
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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_version_ 1866913568255901696
author Polo, Felipe Maia
Xu, Ronald
Weber, Lucas
Silva, Mírian
Bhardwaj, Onkar
Choshen, Leshem
de Oliveira, Allysson Flavio Melo
Sun, Yuekai
Yurochkin, Mikhail
author_facet Polo, Felipe Maia
Xu, Ronald
Weber, Lucas
Silva, Mírian
Bhardwaj, Onkar
Choshen, Leshem
de Oliveira, Allysson Flavio Melo
Sun, Yuekai
Yurochkin, Mikhail
contents Most popular benchmarks for comparing LLMs rely on a limited set of prompt templates, which may not fully capture the LLMs' abilities and can affect the reproducibility of results on leaderboards. Many recent works empirically verify prompt sensitivity and advocate for changes in LLM evaluation. In this paper, we consider the problem of estimating the performance distribution across many prompt variants instead of finding a single prompt to evaluate with. We introduce PromptEval, a method for estimating performance across a large set of prompts borrowing strength across prompts and examples to produce accurate estimates under practical evaluation budgets. The resulting distribution can be used to obtain performance quantiles to construct various robust performance metrics (e.g., top 95% quantile or median). We prove that PromptEval consistently estimates the performance distribution and demonstrate its efficacy empirically on three prominent LLM benchmarks: MMLU, BIG-bench Hard, and LMentry; for example, PromptEval can accurately estimate performance quantiles across 100 prompt templates on MMLU with a budget equivalent to two single-prompt evaluations. Moreover, we show how PromptEval can be useful in LLM-as-a-judge and best prompt identification applications.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_17202
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Efficient multi-prompt evaluation of LLMs
Polo, Felipe Maia
Xu, Ronald
Weber, Lucas
Silva, Mírian
Bhardwaj, Onkar
Choshen, Leshem
de Oliveira, Allysson Flavio Melo
Sun, Yuekai
Yurochkin, Mikhail
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Most popular benchmarks for comparing LLMs rely on a limited set of prompt templates, which may not fully capture the LLMs' abilities and can affect the reproducibility of results on leaderboards. Many recent works empirically verify prompt sensitivity and advocate for changes in LLM evaluation. In this paper, we consider the problem of estimating the performance distribution across many prompt variants instead of finding a single prompt to evaluate with. We introduce PromptEval, a method for estimating performance across a large set of prompts borrowing strength across prompts and examples to produce accurate estimates under practical evaluation budgets. The resulting distribution can be used to obtain performance quantiles to construct various robust performance metrics (e.g., top 95% quantile or median). We prove that PromptEval consistently estimates the performance distribution and demonstrate its efficacy empirically on three prominent LLM benchmarks: MMLU, BIG-bench Hard, and LMentry; for example, PromptEval can accurately estimate performance quantiles across 100 prompt templates on MMLU with a budget equivalent to two single-prompt evaluations. Moreover, we show how PromptEval can be useful in LLM-as-a-judge and best prompt identification applications.
title Efficient multi-prompt evaluation of LLMs
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.17202