Evaluating Large Language Models on Controlled Generation Tasks

Jiao Sun, Yufei Tian, Wangchunshu Zhou, Nan Xu, Qian Hu, Rahul Gupta, John Frederick Wieting, Nanyun Peng, and Xuezhe Ma, in The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), 2023.

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Abstract

While recent studies have looked into the abilities of large language models in various benchmark tasks, including question generation, reading comprehension, multilingual and etc, there have been few studies looking into the controllability of large language models on generation tasks. We present an extensive analysis of various benchmarks including a sentence planning benchmark with different granularities. After comparing large language models against state-of-the-start finetuned smaller models, we present a spectrum showing large language models falling behind, are comparable, or exceed the ability of smaller models. We conclude that **large language models struggle at meeting fine-grained hard constraints**.

Bib Entry

@inproceedings{sun2023eval,
  title = {Evaluating Large Language Models on Controlled Generation Tasks},
  author = {Sun, Jiao and Tian, Yufei and Zhou, Wangchunshu and Xu, Nan and Hu, Qian and Gupta, Rahul and Wieting, John Frederick and Peng, Nanyun and Ma, Xuezhe},
  booktitle = {The 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)},
  year = {2023}
}