In Case You Missed It: ARC 'Challenge' Is Not That Challenging
ARC Challenge appears more difficult than ARC Easy for modern LLMs primarily
due to an evaluation setup that prevents direct comparison of answer choices
rather than inherent complexity. Although some researchers have quietly shifted
to a more appropriate scheme over the last year, the implications of this
change have yet to be widely acknowledged. We highlight this overlooked shift,
show how similar evaluation practices falsely imply reasoning deficits in other
benchmarks, and demonstrate that fairer methods dramatically reduce performance
gaps (e.g. on SIQA) and even yield superhuman results (OpenBookQA). In doing
so, we reveal how evaluation shapes perceived difficulty and offer guidelines
to ensure that multiple-choice evaluations accurately reflect actual model
capabilities.
676bd06524bd46fa1990dcec
Łukasz Borchmann
extracted_confirmed
2025-04-01T05:01:19.976Z
600b381d3cc3b87db94bc0ce
https://cdn-avatars.huggingface.co/v1/production/uploads/600b381d3cc3b87db94bc0ce/I3xpr4gzcG1uXawXBpWpD.jpeg
Łukasz Borchmann
user
Borchmann
In Case You Missed It: ARC 'Challenge' Is Not That Challenging
ARC Challenge appears more difficult than ARC Easy for modern LLMs primarily
due to an evaluation setup that prevents direct comparison of answer choices
rather than inherent complexity. Although some researchers have quietly shifted
to a more appropriate scheme over the last year, the implications of this
change have yet to be widely acknowledged. We highlight this overlooked shift,
show how similar evaluation practices falsely imply reasoning deficits in other
benchmarks, and demonstrate that fairer methods dramatically reduce performance
gaps (e.g. on SIQA) and even yield superhuman results (OpenBookQA). In doing
so, we reveal how evaluation shapes perceived difficulty and offer guidelines
to ensure that multiple-choice evaluations accurately reflect actual model
capabilities.
The evaluation setup in ARC Challenge affects perceived model difficulty, leading to false implications of reasoning deficits, whereas fairer methods reduce performance gaps and reveal superhuman capabilities in tasks like OpenBookQA.
evaluation setup ARC Challenge ARC Easy modern LLMs answer choices reasoning deficits SIQA OpenBookQA multiple-choice evaluations model capabilities