Evaluation Sep 2020

Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding

Dan Hendrycks et al. · ICLR 2021

arXiv:2009.03300

In short

MMLU is a multiple-choice exam of 57 subjects, from elementary maths to law and medicine, meant to test broad knowledge and problem solving. When it launched, only the largest GPT-3 did clearly better than chance, and every model was far below expert level.

Why it matters

It became the headline benchmark in LLM release notes for years, and a case study in benchmarks saturating.

Read first

The 3 Field Guide ideas this paper leans on.

Starting from scratch? The full route 21 ideas · basics first
  1. Natural Language Processing ✓ understood

    The field of AI that lets computers read, interpret, translate and generate human language, from spam filters and search to chatbots.

  2. Token ✓ understood

    The basic unit of text that a language model processes, typically representing a word, subword, or character. Tokens are the fundamental building blocks for LLM input and output.

  3. Tokenization ✓ understood

    Splitting text into tokens, usually subword pieces, and mapping each to an integer ID so a language model can process it.

  4. Language Modeling ✓ understood

    Learning probability distributions over sequences of words to predict what comes next.

  5. Dataset ✓ understood

    A collection of data examples used for training, validating, or testing machine learning models.

  6. Training ✓ understood

    The process of fitting a model to data by repeatedly measuring how wrong its outputs are and adjusting its parameters to reduce that error.

  7. Machine Learning ✓ understood

    Building systems that learn patterns from data instead of following hand-written rules, getting better at a task as they see more examples.

  8. Unsupervised Learning ✓ understood

    Learning from unlabeled data to discover hidden patterns, structures, or relationships without explicit target outputs.

  9. Self-Supervised Learning ✓ understood

    Learning representations from unlabeled data by creating supervised tasks from the data itself (masked prediction, contrastive learning).

  10. Pre-training ✓ understood

    Training a model on a large dataset (often self-supervised) before fine-tuning on specific tasks, enabling transfer learning.

  11. Feature ✓ understood

    A single measurable property of an example, such as a house's floor area or how many links an email contains, used as an input to a model.

  12. Neural Network ✓ understood

    A computational model inspired by biological neural networks, consisting of interconnected nodes (neurons) organized in layers that process information through weighted connections.

  13. Deep Learning ✓ understood

    A subset of machine learning that uses neural networks with multiple layers (deep neural networks) to learn hierarchical representations of data.

  14. Representation Learning ✓ understood

    Learning useful features or representations of data automatically, rather than hand-crafting them.

  15. Embedding ✓ understood

    A list of numbers (a vector) that represents a word, sentence, image or other item, learned so that similar items end up close together.

  16. Attention Mechanism ✓ understood

    A technique that lets a neural network weigh every part of its input when producing each output, focusing on the parts most relevant at that step.

  17. Transformer ✓ understood

    A neural network architecture, introduced in 2017, built from stacked self-attention and feed-forward layers; the basis of nearly every modern large language model.

  18. Large Language Model · read first ✓ understood

    A neural network, almost always a transformer, trained on vast amounts of text to predict the next token, which lets it write, answer, summarize and follow instructions.

  19. Benchmark · read first ✓ understood

    A standardized dataset and task used to compare model performance across different approaches (ImageNet, GLUE, SuperGLUE).

  20. In-Context Learning ✓ understood

    The ability of LLMs to learn from examples and instructions provided in the input prompt without training.

  21. Few-Shot Learning · read first ✓ understood

    Learning to perform a task from a small number of examples provided in the prompt, without parameter updates.

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