AbGen: Evaluating Large Language Models in Ablation Study Design and Evaluation for Scientific Research

Fuente: arXiv
Gespeichert in:
Bibliographische Detailangaben
Hauptverfasser: Zhao, Yilun, Chen, Weiyuan, Xu, Zhijian, Patwardhan, Manasi, Liu, Yixin, Wang, Chengye, Vig, Lovekesh, Cohan, Arman
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
Schlagworte:
Online-Zugang:
Tags: Tag hinzufügen
Keine Tags, Fügen Sie den ersten Tag hinzu!
_version_ 1866918096418111488
author Zhao, Yilun
Chen, Weiyuan
Xu, Zhijian
Patwardhan, Manasi
Liu, Yixin
Wang, Chengye
Vig, Lovekesh
Cohan, Arman
author_facet Zhao, Yilun
Chen, Weiyuan
Xu, Zhijian
Patwardhan, Manasi
Liu, Yixin
Wang, Chengye
Vig, Lovekesh
Cohan, Arman
contents We introduce AbGen, the first benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs in designing ablation studies for scientific research. AbGen consists of 1,500 expert-annotated examples derived from 807 NLP papers. In this benchmark, LLMs are tasked with generating detailed ablation study designs for a specified module or process based on the given research context. Our evaluation of leading LLMs, such as DeepSeek-R1-0528 and o4-mini, highlights a significant performance gap between these models and human experts in terms of the importance, faithfulness, and soundness of the ablation study designs. Moreover, we demonstrate that current automated evaluation methods are not reliable for our task, as they show a significant discrepancy when compared to human assessment. To better investigate this, we develop AbGen-Eval, a meta-evaluation benchmark designed to assess the reliability of commonly used automated evaluation systems in measuring LLM performance on our task. We investigate various LLM-as-Judge systems on AbGen-Eval, providing insights for future research on developing more effective and reliable LLM-based evaluation systems for complex scientific tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_13300
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AbGen: Evaluating Large Language Models in Ablation Study Design and Evaluation for Scientific Research
Zhao, Yilun
Chen, Weiyuan
Xu, Zhijian
Patwardhan, Manasi
Liu, Yixin
Wang, Chengye
Vig, Lovekesh
Cohan, Arman
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
We introduce AbGen, the first benchmark designed to evaluate the capabilities of LLMs in designing ablation studies for scientific research. AbGen consists of 1,500 expert-annotated examples derived from 807 NLP papers. In this benchmark, LLMs are tasked with generating detailed ablation study designs for a specified module or process based on the given research context. Our evaluation of leading LLMs, such as DeepSeek-R1-0528 and o4-mini, highlights a significant performance gap between these models and human experts in terms of the importance, faithfulness, and soundness of the ablation study designs. Moreover, we demonstrate that current automated evaluation methods are not reliable for our task, as they show a significant discrepancy when compared to human assessment. To better investigate this, we develop AbGen-Eval, a meta-evaluation benchmark designed to assess the reliability of commonly used automated evaluation systems in measuring LLM performance on our task. We investigate various LLM-as-Judge systems on AbGen-Eval, providing insights for future research on developing more effective and reliable LLM-based evaluation systems for complex scientific tasks.
title AbGen: Evaluating Large Language Models in Ablation Study Design and Evaluation for Scientific Research
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13300