Elamur Research
☰
home / papers / 2024 / MT-Eval: A Multi-Turn Capabilities Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models

MT-Eval: A Multi-Turn Capabilities Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models

Written for the Research library (claude-opus-5-5) from the paper text. Original — aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1124.pdf

Summary

Most LLM benchmarks test models on isolated prompts or, like MT-Bench, on very short two-turn exchanges. They therefore reveal little about how assistants behave over longer dialogues. MT-Eval fills this gap. From real user–assistant logs in LMSYS-Chat-1M, the authors derive four interaction types: Recollection (recalling earlier details), Expansion (new questions on the same topic), Refinement (instructions revised or made stricter) and Follow-up (questions building on the model's last reply). Test dialogues come from adapted existing datasets and new GPT-4-generated material, which human annotators checked and often rewrote to reduce data contamination. Every multi-turn query also has a single-turn twin for direct comparison. Ten open and closed LLMs were scored, with GPT-4 serving as judge. Closed models lead overall, although some open models beat GPT-3.5-Turbo on specific tasks. Most models lose quality in the multi-turn setting regardless of their underlying strength. The main causes are growing distance from relevant content and error propagation. The benchmark offers a reproducible way to measure conversational robustness.

Key points

  • MT-Eval contains 168 dialogues with 1,170 turns (about 7 turns per dialogue), covering Recollection, Expansion, Refinement and Follow-up. Code and data are on GitHub (KwanWaiChung/MT-Eval).
  • GPT-4 drafted new instances under human-in-the-loop review, and annotators modified or replaced 82% of the generated queries. Responses were rated by GPT-4 with chain-of-thought prompting, which the authors report agrees closely with human ratings.
  • The ten evaluated models include GPT-3.5-Turbo, Llama-2-chat (7B/13B), Vicuna-v1.5, Qwen-chat, ChatGLM3-6B, Mistral-Instruct-7B and Mixtral-Instruct-8x7B. No 70B-scale open models were tested because of compute limits.
  • Placing distracting turns between a document and its queries consistently lowers Refinement scores. Placing them at the start of the dialogue has mixed effects.
  • Error propagation is clear in the ablations. With random labels in the dialogue history, classification accuracy falls well below single-turn accuracy (Vicuna-13B: 45 vs. 75) and drops further by turn 10 (28). Recollection scores also rise sharply when the history contains gold responses instead of the model's own (Mixtral: 3.21 → 7.11).

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: Machine translation · Natural language processing

Cited by

47 papers of our library cite it (of the 140673 whose bibliographies we read).

Cite

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.1124

@inproceedings{kwan2024mt,
  title = {{MT-Eval: A Multi-Turn Capabilities Evaluation Benchmark for Large Language Models}},
  author = {Kwan, Wai-Chung and Zeng, Xingshan and Jiang, Yuxin and Wang, Yufei and Li, Liangyou and Shang, Lifeng and Jiang, Xin and Liu, Qun and Wong, Kam-Fai},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.1124},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.1124}
}

References

23 references, 10 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

  1. Jinze Bai, Shuai Bai, Yunfei Chu, Zeyu Cui, Kai Dang, Xiaodong Deng, Yang Fan, Wenbin Ge, Yu Han, Fei Huang, Binyuan Hui, Luo Ji, Mei Li, Junyang Lin, Runji Lin, Dayiheng Liu, Gao Liu, Chengqiang Lu, Keming Lu, Jianxin Ma, Rui Men, Xingzhang Ren, Xuancheng Ren, Chuanqi Tan, Sinan Tan, Jianhong Tu, Peng Wang, Shijie Wang, Wei Wang, Shengguang Wu, Benfeng Xu, Jin Xu, An Yang, Hao Yang, Jian Yang, Shusheng Yang, Yang Yao, Bowen Yu, Hongyi Yuan, Zheng Yuan, Jianwei Zhang, Xingxuan Zhang, Yichang Zhang, Zhenru Zhang, Chang Zhou, Jingren Zhou, Xiaohuan Zhou, and Tianhang Zhu. 2023. Qwen Technical Report. find our card
  2. Yonatan Bitton, Hritik Bansal, Jack Hessel, Rulin Shao, Wanrong Zhu, Anas Awadalla, Josh Gardner, Rohan Taori, and Ludwig Schmidt. 2023. VisIT-Bench: A Benchmark for Vision-Language Instruction Following Inspired by Real-World Use. find
  3. Tom Brown, Benjamin Mann, Nick Ryder, Melanie Subbiah, Jared D Kaplan, Prafulla Dhariwal, Arvind Neelakantan, Pranav Shyam, Girish Sastry, Amanda Askell, Sandhini Agarwal, Ariel Herbert-Voss, Gretchen Krueger, Tom Henighan, Rewon Child, Aditya Ramesh, Daniel Ziegler, Jeffrey Wu, Clemens Winter, Chris Hesse, Mark Chen, Eric Sigler, Mateusz Litwin, Scott Gray, Benjamin Chess, Jack Clark, Christopher Berner, Sam McCandlish, Alec Radford, Ilya Sutskever, and Dario Amodei. 2020. Language Models are Few-Shot Learners. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, volume 33, pages 1877–1901. Curran Associates, Inc. find
  4. Chi-Min Chan, Weize Chen, Yusheng Su, Jianxuan Yu, Wei Xue, Shanghang Zhang, Jie Fu, and Zhiyuan Liu. 2023. Chateval: Towards better llm-based evaluators through multi-agent debate. In The Twelfth International Conference on Learning Representations. find our card
  5. Hailin Chen, Fangkai Jiao, Xingxuan Li, Chengwei Qin, Mathieu Ravaut, Ruochen Zhao, Caiming Xiong, and Shafiq Joty. 2023. ChatGPT’s One-year Anniversary: Are Open-Source Large Language Models Catching up? find
  6. Wei-Lin Chiang, Zhuohan Li, Zi Lin, Ying Sheng, Zhanghao Wu, Hao Zhang, Lianmin Zheng, Siyuan Zhuang, Yonghao Zhuang, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Ion Stoica, and Eric P. Xing. 2023. Vicuna: An open-source chatbot impressing gpt-4 with 90%* chatgpt quality. find
  7. Zhengxiao Du, Yujie Qian, Xiao Liu, Ming Ding, Jiezhong Qiu, Zhilin Yang, and Jie Tang. 2022. GLM: General Language Model Pre-training with Autoregressive Blank Infilling. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 320–335, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics. find
  8. Dan Hendrycks, Collin Burns, Steven Basart, Andy Zou, Mantas Mazeika, Dawn Song, and Jacob Steinhardt. 2020. Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding. In International Conference on Learning Representations. find our card
  9. Albert Q. Jiang, Alexandre Sablayrolles, Arthur Mensch, Chris Bamford, Devendra Singh Chaplot, Diego de las Casas, Florian Bressand, Gianna Lengyel, Guillaume Lample, Lucile Saulnier, Lélio Renard Lavaud, Marie-Anne Lachaux, Pierre Stock, Teven Le Scao, Thibaut Lavril, Thomas Wang, Timothée Lacroix, and William El Sayed. 2023. Mistral 7B. Albert Q. Jiang, Alexandre Sablayrolles, Antoine Roux, Arthur Mensch, Blanche Savary, Chris Bamford, Devendra Singh Chaplot, Diego de las Casas, Emma Bou Hanna, Florian Bressand, Gianna Lengyel, Guillaume Bour, Guillaume Lample, Lélio Renard Lavaud, Lucile Saulnier, Marie-Anne Lachaux, Pierre Stock, Sandeep Subramanian, Sophia Yang, Szymon Antoniak, Teven Le Scao, Théophile Gervet, Thibaut Lavril, Thomas Wang, Timothée Lacroix, and William El Sayed. 2024. Mixtral of Experts. find
  10. Jiang, Haozhun Jin, Denny Jin, Shino Jomoto, Billie Jonn, Heewoo Jun, Tomer Kaftan, Łukasz Kaiser, Ali Kamali, Ingmar Kanitscheider, Nitish Shirish Keskar, Tabarak Khan, Logan Kilpatrick, Jong Wook Kim, Christina Kim, Yongjik Kim, Hendrik Kirchner, Jamie Kiros, Matt Knight, Daniel Kokotajlo, Łukasz Kondraciuk, Andrew Kondrich, Aris Konstantinidis, Kyle Kosic, Gretchen Krueger, Vishal Kuo, Michael Lampe, Ikai Lan, Teddy Lee, Jan Leike, Jade Leung, Daniel Levy, Chak Ming Li, Rachel Lim, Molly Lin, Stephanie Lin, Mateusz Litwin, Theresa Lopez, Ryan Lowe, Patricia Lue, Anna Makanju, Kim Malfacini, Sam Manning, Todor Markov, Yaniv Markovski, Bianca Martin, Katie Mayer, Andrew Mayne, Bob McGrew, Scott Mayer McKinney, Christine McLeavey, Paul McMillan, Jake McNeil, David Medina, Aalok Mehta, Jacob Menick, Luke Metz, Andrey Mishchenko, Pamela Mishkin, Vinnie Monaco, Evan Morikawa, Daniel Mossing, Tong Mu, Mira Murati, Oleg Murk, David Mély, Ashvin Nair, Reiichiro Nakano, Rajeev Nayak, Arvind Neelakantan, Richard Ngo, Hyeonwoo Noh, Long Ouyang, Cullen O’Keefe, Jakub Pachocki, Alex Paino, Joe Palermo, Ashley Pantuliano, Giambattista Parascandolo, Joel Parish, Emy Parparita, Alex Passos, Mikhail Pavlov, Andrew Peng, Adam Perelman, Filipe de Avila Belbute Peres, Michael Petrov, Henrique Ponde de Oliveira Pinto, Michael, Pokorny, Michelle Pokrass, Vitchyr Pong, Tolly Powell, Alethea Power, Boris Power, Elizabeth Proehl, Raul Puri, Alec Radford, Jack Rae, Aditya Ramesh, Cameron Raymond, Francis Real, Kendra Rimbach, Carl Ross, Bob Rotsted, Henri Roussez, Nick Ryder, Mario Saltarelli, Ted Sanders, Shibani Santurkar, Girish Sastry, Heather Schmidt, David Schnurr, John Schulman, Daniel Selsam, Kyla Sheppard, Toki Sherbakov, Jessica Shieh, Sarah Shoker, Pranav Shyam, Szymon Sidor, Eric Sigler, Maddie Simens, Jordan Sitkin, Katarina Slama, Ian Sohl, Benjamin Sokolowsky, Yang Song, Natalie Staudacher, Felipe Petroski Such, Natalie Summers, Ilya Sutskever, Jie Tang, Nikolas Tezak, Madeleine Thompson, Phil Tillet, Amin Tootoonchian, Elizabeth Tseng, Preston Tuggle, Nick Turley, Jerry Tworek, Juan Felipe Cerón Uribe, Andrea Vallone, Arun Vijayvergiya, Chelsea Voss, Carroll Wainwright, Justin Jay Wang, Alvin Wang, Ben Wang, Jonathan Ward, Jason Wei, C. J. Weinmann, Akila Welihinda, Peter Welinder, Jiayi Weng, Lilian Weng, Matt Wiethoff, Dave Willner, Clemens Winter, Samuel Wolrich, Hannah Wong, Lauren Workman, Sherwin Wu, Jeff Wu, Michael Wu, Kai Xiao, Tao Xu, Sarah Yoo, Kevin Yu, Qiming Yuan, Wojciech Zaremba, Rowan Zellers, Chong Zhang, Marvin Zhang, Shengjia Zhao, Tianhao Zheng, Juntang Zhuang, William Zhuk, and Barret Zoph. 2023. GPT-4 Technical Report. find
  11. Mina Lee, Megha Srivastava, Amelia Hardy, John Thickstun, Esin Durmus, Ashwin Paranjape, Ines Gerard-Ursin, Xiang Lisa Li, Faisal Ladhak, Frieda Rong, Rose E. Wang, Minae Kwon, Joon Sung Park, Hancheng Cao, Tony Lee, Rishi Bommasani, Michael S. Bernstein, and Percy Liang. 2023. Evaluating Human-Language Model Interaction. Transactions on Machine Learning Research. find
  12. Yusheng Liao, Yutong Meng, Hongcheng Liu, Yanfeng Wang, and Yu Wang. 2023. An automatic evaluation framework for multi-turn medical consultations capabilities of large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.02077. ↗
  13. Yang Liu, Dan Iter, Yichong Xu, Shuohang Wang, Ruochen Xu, and Chenguang Zhu. 2023. G-Eval: NLG Evaluation using Gpt-4 with Better Human Alignment. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 2511–2522, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics. find
  14. Sewon Min, Xinxi Lyu, Ari Holtzman, Mikel Artetxe, Mike Lewis, Hannaneh Hajishirzi, and Luke Zettlemoyer. 2022. Rethinking the Role of Demonstrations: What Makes In-Context Learning Work? OpenAI, Josh Achiam, Steven Adler, Sandhini Agarwal, Lama Ahmad, Ilge Akkaya, Florencia Leoni Aleman, Diogo Almeida, Janko Altenschmidt, Sam Altman, Shyamal Anadkat, Red Avila, Igor Babuschkin, Suchir Balaji, Valerie Balcom, Paul Baltescu, Haiming Bao, Mo Bavarian, Jeff Belgum, Irwan Bello, Jake Berdine, Gabriel Bernadett-Shapiro, Christopher Berner, Lenny Bogdonoff, Oleg Boiko, Madelaine Boyd, Anna-Luisa Brakman, Greg Brockman, Tim Brooks, Miles Brundage, Kevin Button, Trevor Cai, Rosie Campbell, Andrew Cann, Brittany Carey, Chelsea Carlson, Rory Carmichael, Brooke Chan, Che Chang, Fotis Chantzis, Derek Chen, Sully Chen, Ruby Chen, Jason Chen, Mark Chen, Ben Chess, Chester Cho, Casey Chu, Hyung Won Chung, Dave Cummings, Jeremiah Currier, Yunxing Dai, Cory Decareaux, Thomas Degry, Noah Deutsch, Damien Deville, Arka Dhar, David Dohan, Steve Dowling, Sheila Dunning, Adrien Ecoffet, Atty Eleti, Tyna Eloundou, David Farhi, Liam Fedus, Niko Felix, Simón Posada Fishman, Juston Forte, Isabella Fulford, Leo Gao, Elie Georges, Christian Gibson, Vik Goel, Tarun Gogineni, Gabriel Goh, Rapha Gontijo-Lopes, Jonathan Gordon, Morgan Grafstein, Scott Gray, Ryan Greene, Joshua Gross, Shixiang Shane Gu, Yufei Guo, Chris Hallacy, Jesse Han, Jeff Harris, Yuchen He, Mike Heaton, Johannes Heidecke, Chris Hesse, Alan Hickey, Wade Hickey, Peter Hoeschele, Brandon Houghton, Kenny Hsu, Shengli Hu, Xin Hu, Joost Huizinga, Shantanu Jain, Shawn Jain, Joanne Jang, Angela Jiang, Roger Long Ouyang, Jeffrey Wu, Xu Jiang, Diogo Almeida, Carroll Wainwright, Pamela Mishkin, Chong Zhang, Sandhini Agarwal, Katarina Slama, Alex Ray, John Schulman, Jacob Hilton, Fraser Kelton, Luke Miller, Maddie Simens, Amanda Askell, Peter Welinder, Paul F. Christiano, Jan Leike, and Ryan Lowe. 2022. Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback. Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems, 35:27730–27744. find our card
  15. Hugo Touvron, Thibaut Lavril, Gautier Izacard, Xavier Martinet, Marie-Anne Lachaux, Timothée Lacroix, Baptiste Rozière, Naman Goyal, Eric Hambro, Faisal Azhar, et al. 2023a. Llama: Open and efficient foundation language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2302.13971. ↗
  16. Hugo Touvron, Louis Martin, Kevin Stone, Peter Albert, Amjad Almahairi, Yasmine Babaei, Nikolay Bashlykov, Soumya Batra, Prajjwal Bhargava, Shruti Bhosale, Dan Bikel, Lukas Blecher, Cristian Canton Ferrer, Moya Chen, Guillem Cucurull, David Esiobu, Jude Fernandes, Jeremy Fu, Wenyin Fu, Brian Fuller, Cynthia Gao, Vedanuj Goswami, Naman Goyal, Anthony Hartshorn, Saghar Hosseini, Rui Hou, Hakan Inan, Marcin Kardas, Viktor Kerkez, Madian Khabsa, Isabel Kloumann, Artem Korenev, Punit Singh Koura, Marie-Anne Lachaux, Thibaut Lavril, Jenya Lee, Diana Liskovich, Yinghai Lu, Yuning Mao, Xavier Martinet, Todor Mihaylov, Pushkar Mishra, Igor Molybog, Yixin Nie, Andrew Poulton, Jeremy Reizenstein, Rashi Rungta, Kalyan Saladi, Alan Schelten, Ruan Silva, Eric Michael Smith, Ranjan Subramanian, Xiaoqing Ellen Tan, Binh Tang, Ross Taylor, Adina Williams, Jian Xiang Kuan, Puxin Xu, Zheng Yan, Iliyan Zarov, Yuchen Zhang, Angela Fan, Melanie Kambadur, Sharan Narang, Aurelien Rodriguez, Robert Stojnic, Sergey Edunov, and Thomas Scialom. 2023b. Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models. find
  17. Ion Stoica, and Hao Zhang. 2023a. LMSYS-Chat-1M: A Large-Scale Real-World LLM Conversation Dataset. find our card
  18. Lianmin Zheng, Wei-Lin Chiang, Ying Sheng, Siyuan Zhuang, Zhanghao Wu, Yonghao Zhuang, Zi Lin, Zhuohan Li, Dacheng Li, Eric P. Xing, Hao Zhang, Joseph E. Gonzalez, and Ion Stoica. 2023b. Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena. find
  19. Jeffrey Zhou, Tianjian Lu, Swaroop Mishra, Siddhartha Brahma, Sujoy Basu, Yi Luan, Denny Zhou, and Le Hou. 2023. Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Models. find our card
  20. Xingyao Wang, Zihan Wang, Jiateng Liu, Yangyi Chen, Lifan Yuan, Hao Peng, and Heng Ji. 2023. MINT: Evaluating LLMs in Multi-turn Interaction with Tools and Language Feedback. find our card
  21. Jason Wei, Xuezhi Wang, Dale Schuurmans, Maarten Bosma, Brian Ichter, Fei Xia, Ed H. Chi, Quoc V. Le, and Denny Zhou. 2022. Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models. In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems. find our card
  22. Xiang Yue, Yuansheng Ni, Kai Zhang, Tianyu Zheng, Ruoqi Liu, Ge Zhang, Samuel Stevens, Dongfu Jiang, Weiming Ren, Yuxuan Sun, Cong Wei, Botao Yu, Ruibin Yuan, Renliang Sun, Ming Yin, Boyuan Zheng, Zhenzhu Yang, Yibo Liu, Wenhao Huang, Huan Sun, Yu Su, and Wenhu Chen. 2023. MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI. find our card
  23. Wayne Xin Zhao, Kun Zhou, Junyi Li, Tianyi Tang, Xiaolei Wang, Yupeng Hou, Yingqian Min, Beichen Zhang, Junjie Zhang, Zican Dong, et al. 2023. A survey of large language models. arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.18223. Lianmin Zheng, Wei-Lin Chiang, Ying Sheng, Tianle Li, Siyuan Zhuang, Zhanghao Wu, Yonghao Zhuang, Zhuohan Li, Zi Lin, Eric P. Xing, Joseph E. Gonzalez, ↗ our card