The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to great strides in model capabilities like long-context understanding and reasoning.However, as LLMs are able to process longer contexts, it becomes more challenging to evaluate whether they have acquired certain capabilities, since the length of text (e.g., 200K tokens) they can process far exceeds what humans can reliably assess in a reasonable duration.In this paper, we propose using complex synthetic tasks as a proxy evaluation method, and present S3Eval, a Synthetic, Scalable, Systematic evaluation suite for LLMs evaluation.The synthetic nature of S3Eval provides users full control over the dataset, allowing them to systematically probe LLM capabilities by scaling text length and varying task difficulty across diverse scenarios.The strong correlation between S3Eval and real-world benchmarks demonstrates the soundness of using S3Eval for evaluation of LLMs.S3Eval provides a flexible and infinite long-context data generation method. We have generated a comprehensive dataset called S3Eval-Standard, and experimental results have shown that it poses significant challenges for all existing LLMs.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive reasoning capabilities, yet there is ongoing debate about these abilities and the potential data contamination problem recently. This paper aims to evaluate the reasoning capacities of LLMs, specifically in solving recent competition-level programming problems in Codeforces, which are expert-crafted and unique, requiring deep understanding and robust reasoning skills. We first provide a comprehensive evaluation of GPT-4’s perceived zero-shot performance on this task, considering various aspects such as problems’ release time, difficulties, and types of errors encountered. Surprisingly, the perceived performance of GPT-4 has experienced a cliff like decline in problems after September 2021 consistently across all the difficulties and types of problems, which shows the potential data contamination, as well as the challenges for any existing LLM to solve unseen complex reasoning problems. We further explore various approaches such as fine-tuning, Chain-of-Thought prompting and problem description simplification. Unfortunately, none of them is able to consistently mitigate the challenges. Through our work, we emphasize the importance of this excellent data source for assessing the genuine reasoning capabilities of LLMs, and foster the development of LLMs with stronger reasoning abilities and better generalization in the future.

Answering multi-hop questions over hybrid factual knowledge from the given text and table (TextTableQA) is a challenging task. Existing models mainly adopt a retriever-reader framework, which have several deficiencies, such as noisy labeling in training retriever, insufficient utilization of heterogeneous information over text and table, and deficient ability for different reasoning operations. In this paper, we propose a three-stage TextTableQA framework S3HQA, which comprises of retriever, selector, and reasoner. We use a retriever with refinement training to solve the noisy labeling problem. Then, a hybrid selector considers the linked relationships between heterogeneous data to select the most relevant factual knowledge. For the final stage, instead of adapting a reading comprehension module like in previous methods, we employ a generation-based reasoner to obtain answers. This includes two approaches: a row-wise generator and an LLM prompting generator (first time used in this task). The experimental results demonstrate that our method achieves competitive results in the few-shot setting. When trained on the full dataset, our approach outperforms all baseline methods, ranking first on the HybridQA leaderboard.