C-Eval: A Multi-Level Multi-Discipline Chinese Evaluation Suite for Foundation Models
Written for the Research library (claude-opus-5-5) from the paper text, in our own words: the license "CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 (arXiv)" does not allow redistributing the text itself. Original — arxiv.org/pdf/2305.08322
Summary
Most benchmarks for large language models are built in English and mirror the knowledge of English-speaking regions, so they say little about how well a model serves Chinese users. The authors built C-Eval, a set of 13,948 four-option multiple-choice exam questions covering 52 subjects in STEM, humanities, social science and other fields. The questions come from four levels, from middle school up to professional certification. To lower the chance that models saw the questions during pretraining, the authors took them from mock and local exams rather than official national tests. They also converted them by hand from PDF and Word files, including LaTeX for formulas. A harder subset, C-Eval Hard, focuses on subjects that need heavy reasoning, such as advanced mathematics and college physics. Among the English- and Chinese-oriented LLMs tested, only GPT-4 averaged above 60% (66.4%). Chinese-focused models came closer to the leaders on knowledge questions than on reasoning. C-Eval gives Chinese LLM developers a standard way to measure progress. It is also a useful template for building a similar benchmark in another language, such as Ukrainian.
Key points
- Scale and structure: 13,948 questions across 52 subjects in four categories (STEM, Humanities, Social Science, Other). The data is split into dev (260), validation (1,346) and test (12,342) sets. Test labels are not public, and average validation accuracy ranks models in roughly the same order as the test set.
- Subject selection: College subjects come from all 13 official undergraduate major categories of China's Ministry of Education. The 12 professional subjects come from the national vocational qualification directory and include law, medicine, accounting and civil service exams.
- C-Eval Hard: GPT-4 scored 53.3% zero-shot (answer-only) and 56.8% with five-shot chain-of-thought. Only GPT-4, ChatGPT and Claude beat random guessing by 10 or more points.
- Model comparison: GPT-4, ChatGPT and Claude were the top three, even though none was built specifically for Chinese. GLM-130B trailed ChatGPT by 12.3 points in STEM.
- Resources: The data and evaluation code are available at github.com/hkust-nlp/ceval, and the leaderboard is at cevalbenchmark.com (NeurIPS 2023 Datasets and Benchmarks track).
Cited by
- Yi: Open Foundation Models by 01.AI
- Qwen Technical Report
- InternLM2 Technical Report
- A Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Models
- Benchmarking Large Language Models in Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- Expanding Performance Boundaries of Open-Source Multimodal Models with Model, Data, and Test-Time Scaling
- Efficient and Effective Text Encoding for Chinese LLaMA and Alpaca
- DeepSeek-Coder-V2: Breaking the Barrier of Closed-Source Models in Code Intelligence
- DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning
- DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence
- LawBench: Benchmarking Legal Knowledge of Large Language Models
- Evaluating Large Language Models: A Comprehensive Survey
- OlympiadBench: A Challenging Benchmark for Promoting AGI with Olympiad-Level Bilingual Multimodal Scientific Problems
- MiniCPM: Unveiling the Potential of Small Language Models with Scalable Training Strategies
- A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions
- TrustLLM: Trustworthiness in Large Language Models
- Kimi k1.5: Scaling Reinforcement Learning with LLMs
- Kimi K2: Open Agentic Intelligence
- CMMLU: Measuring massive multitask language understanding in Chinese
- MathVista: Evaluating Mathematical Reasoning of Foundation Models in Visual Contexts
- Large Language Diffusion Models
- Aligning Large Language Models with Human: A Survey
- Survey on Factuality in Large Language Models: Knowledge, Retrieval and Domain-Specificity
- InternVL3.5: Advancing Open-Source Multimodal Models in Versatility, Reasoning, and Efficiency
- Baichuan 2: Open Large-scale Language Models
- Qwen3 Technical Report
- Instruction Tuning for Large Language Models: A Survey
- SafetyBench: Evaluating the Safety of Large Language Models
- A Survey of Large Language Models
- LlamaFactory: Unified Efficient Fine-Tuning of 100+ Language Models
- InternVL3: Exploring Advanced Training and Test-Time Recipes for Open-Source Multimodal Models
Cite
@misc{huang2023c,
title = {{C-Eval: A Multi-Level Multi-Discipline Chinese Evaluation Suite for Foundation Models}},
author = {Huang, Yuzhen and Bai, Yuzhuo and Zhu, Zhihao and Zhang, Junlei and Zhang, Jinghan and Su, Tangjun and Liu, Junteng and Lv, Chuancheng and Zhang, Yikai and Lei, Jiayi and Fu, Yao and Sun, Maosong and He, Junxian},
year = {2023},
doi = {10.48550/arxiv.2305.08322},
eprint = {2305.08322},
archivePrefix = {arXiv},
url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2305.08322}
}References
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