Evaluating the Unseen Capabilities: How Many Theorems Do LLMs Know?

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Autori principali: Li, Xiang, Xin, Jiayi, Long, Qi, Su, Weijie J.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Li, Xiang
Xin, Jiayi
Long, Qi
Su, Weijie J.
author_facet Li, Xiang
Xin, Jiayi
Long, Qi
Su, Weijie J.
contents Accurate evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for understanding their capabilities and guiding their development. However, current evaluations often inconsistently reflect the actual capacities of these models. In this paper, we demonstrate that one of many contributing factors to this \textit{evaluation crisis} is the oversight of unseen knowledge -- information encoded by LLMs but not directly observed or not yet observed during evaluations. We introduce KnowSum, a statistical framework designed to provide a more comprehensive assessment by quantifying the unseen knowledge for a class of evaluation tasks. KnowSum estimates the unobserved portion by extrapolating from the appearance frequencies of observed knowledge instances. We demonstrate the effectiveness and utility of KnowSum across three critical applications: estimating total knowledge, evaluating information retrieval effectiveness, and measuring output diversity. Our experiments reveal that a substantial volume of knowledge is omitted when relying solely on observed LLM performance. Importantly, KnowSum yields significantly different comparative rankings for several common LLMs based on their internal knowledge.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_02058
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating the Unseen Capabilities: How Many Theorems Do LLMs Know?
Li, Xiang
Xin, Jiayi
Long, Qi
Su, Weijie J.
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Applications
Methodology
Accurate evaluation of large language models (LLMs) is crucial for understanding their capabilities and guiding their development. However, current evaluations often inconsistently reflect the actual capacities of these models. In this paper, we demonstrate that one of many contributing factors to this \textit{evaluation crisis} is the oversight of unseen knowledge -- information encoded by LLMs but not directly observed or not yet observed during evaluations. We introduce KnowSum, a statistical framework designed to provide a more comprehensive assessment by quantifying the unseen knowledge for a class of evaluation tasks. KnowSum estimates the unobserved portion by extrapolating from the appearance frequencies of observed knowledge instances. We demonstrate the effectiveness and utility of KnowSum across three critical applications: estimating total knowledge, evaluating information retrieval effectiveness, and measuring output diversity. Our experiments reveal that a substantial volume of knowledge is omitted when relying solely on observed LLM performance. Importantly, KnowSum yields significantly different comparative rankings for several common LLMs based on their internal knowledge.
title Evaluating the Unseen Capabilities: How Many Theorems Do LLMs Know?
topic Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Machine Learning
Applications
Methodology
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02058