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Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding

Written for the Research library (claude-opus-5-5) from the paper text, in our own words: the license "arXiv — non-exclusive licence to distribute" does not allow redistributing the text itself. Original — arxiv.org/pdf/2009.03300

Summary

Existing NLP benchmarks such as GLUE, SuperGLUE and commonsense suites like HellaSwag were saturated within roughly a year. They also say little about the specialized knowledge large Transformers absorb from huge pretraining corpora. To address this, Hendrycks et al. built a multiple-choice exam of 57 subjects spanning STEM, humanities, social sciences and professional fields such as law and medicine. Difficulty ranges from elementary school to professional certification. Students gathered the questions by hand from free online sources, including GRE and USMLE practice material and university course questions. Models are evaluated only zero-shot or few-shot, so the test measures knowledge gained during pretraining rather than task-specific fine-tuning. GPT-3 models up to 13B parameters score at chance level. The 175B GPT-3 reaches 43.9%, still far below estimated expert accuracy. Its results vary widely across subjects. It is weak on calculation-heavy topics and on value-laden ones such as law and morality, and its confidence is poorly calibrated. The benchmark gives a fine-grained way to locate blind spots in a model's knowledge and reasoning.

Key points

  • Dataset size and splits: 15,908 questions in total, divided into:
    • a few-shot dev set (5 questions per subject),
    • a validation set (1,540 questions),
    • a test set (14,079 questions, at least 100 per subject).
  • Human baselines: Amazon Mechanical Turk workers score 34.5%. Expert-level accuracy, based on 95th-percentile exam takers, is estimated at about 89.8%.
  • GPT-3 results: The 175B model averages 43.9%, roughly 20 points above the 25% chance level. Its best subject is near 70%, while several subjects remain near random.
  • Calibration: GPT-3's average confidence can differ from its real accuracy by up to 24%.
  • Availability: Data and code are released at github.com/hendrycks/test.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

Fields: Mathematics & statistics

Cited by

3197 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read); 179 of them have a page here, the first 100 below, 3018 not yet.

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.48550/arxiv.2009.03300 · arXiv 2009.03300

@misc{hendrycks2020measuring,
  title = {{Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding}},
  author = {Hendrycks, Dan and Burns, Collin and Basart, Steven and Zou, Andy and Mazeika, Mantas and Song, Dawn and Steinhardt, Jacob},
  year = {2020},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2009.03300},
  eprint = {2009.03300},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2009.03300}
}

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