The rapid growth of evaluation methodologies and datasets for large language models (LLMs) has created a pressing need for their unified integration. Meanwhile, concerns about data contamination and bias compromise the trustworthiness of evaluation findings, while the efficiency of evaluation processes remains a bottleneck due to the significant computational costs associated with LLM inference.In response to these challenges, we introduce FreeEval, a modular framework not only for conducting trustworthy and efficient automatic evaluations of LLMs but also serving as a platform to develop and validate new evaluation methodologies. FreeEval addresses key challenges through: (1) unified abstractions that simplify the integration of diverse evaluation methods, including dynamic evaluations requiring complex LLM interactions; (2) built-in meta-evaluation techniques such as data contamination detection and human evaluation to enhance result fairness; (3) a high-performance infrastructure with distributed computation and caching strategies for efficient large-scale evaluations; and (4) an interactive Visualizer for result analysis and interpretation to support innovation of evaluation techniques. We open-source all our code at https://github.com/WisdomShell/FreeEval and our demostration video, live demo, installation guides are available at: https://freeeval.zhuohao.me/.

Aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values and preferences is a significant challenge. Training-based methods, such as reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) and direct preference optimization (DPO), require substantial resources and are impractical for API-based LLMs. Post-processing methods decouple alignment from training but may incur high multiple-time inference costs or rely on less knowledgeable lightweight models for response refinement. In this paper, we propose a new LLM alignment paradigm from the perspective of pre-processing. By reformulating risky queries into highly relevant yet harmless ones before feeding them into LLMs, our method eliminates the high costs of training base LLMs, efficiently applies to both open-source and proprietary LLMs, and achieves a promising balance of harmlessness and helpfulness. For example, with Vicuna-7B as the LLM to align, it enhances helpfulness by 28.52% over DPO while maintaining comparable harmlessness levels. When applied to Gemini-1.5-pro, it increased harmlessness and helpfulness by 7.04% and 29.37%, respectively.

Automatic evaluation methods for large language models (LLMs) are hindered by data contamination, leading to inflated assessments of their effectiveness. Existing strategies, which aim to detect contaminated texts, focus on quantifying contamination status instead of accurately gauging model performance. In this paper, we introduce KIEval, a Knowledge-grounded Interactive Evaluation framework, which incorporates an LLM-powered “interactor” role for the first time to accomplish a dynamic contamination-resilient evaluation. Starting with a question in a conventional LLM benchmark involving domain-specific knowledge, KIEval utilizes dynamically generated, multi-round, and knowledge-focused dialogues to determine whether a model’s response is merely a recall of benchmark answers or demonstrates a deep comprehension to apply knowledge in more complex conversations. Extensive experiments on seven leading LLMs across five datasets validate KIEval’s effectiveness and generalization. We also reveal that data contamination brings no contribution or even negative effect to models’ real-world applicability and understanding, and existing contamination detection methods for LLMs can only identify contamination in pre-training but not during supervised fine-tuning.

Nowadays, pretrained language models (PLMs) have dominated the majority of NLP tasks. While, little research has been conducted on systematically evaluating the language abilities of PLMs. In this paper, we present a large-scale empirical study on general language ability evaluation of PLMs (ElitePLM). In our study, we design four evaluation dimensions, memory, comprehension, reasoning, and composition, to measure ten widely-used PLMs within five categories. Our empirical results demonstrate that: (1) PLMs with varying training objectives and strategies are good at different ability tests; (2) fine-tuning PLMs in downstream tasks is usually sensitive to the data size and distribution; (3) PLMs have excellent transferability between similar tasks. Moreover, the prediction results of PLMs in our experiments are released as an open resource for more deep and detailed analysis on the language abilities of PLMs. This paper can guide the future work to select, apply, and design PLMs for specific tasks. We have made all the details of experiments publicly available at https://github.com/RUCAIBox/ElitePLM.

To facilitate research on text generation, this paper presents a comprehensive and unified library, TextBox 2.0, focusing on the use of pre-trained language models (PLMs). To be comprehensive, our library covers 13 common text generation tasks and their corresponding 83 datasets and further incorporates 45 PLMs covering general, translation, Chinese, dialogue, controllable, distilled, prompting, and lightweight PLMs. We also implement 4 efficient training strategies and provide 4 generation objectives for pre-training new PLMs from scratch. To be unified, we design the interfaces to support the entire research pipeline (from data loading to training and evaluation), ensuring that each step can be fulfilled in a unified way. Despite the rich functionality, it is easy to use our library, either through the friendly Python API or command line. To validate the effectiveness of our library, we conduct extensive experiments and exemplify four types of research scenarios. The project is released at the link: https://github.com/RUCAIBox/TextBox#2.0.

In this paper, we release an open-source library, called TextBox, to provide a unified, modularized, and extensible text generation framework. TextBox aims to support a broad set of text generation tasks and models. In our library, we implement 21 text generation models on 9 benchmark datasets, covering the categories of VAE, GAN, and pretrained language models. Meanwhile, our library maintains sufficient modularity and extensibility by properly decomposing the model architecture, inference, and learning process into highly reusable modules, which allows users to easily incorporate new models into our framework. The above features make TextBox especially suitable for researchers and practitioners to quickly reproduce baseline models and develop new models. TextBox is implemented based on PyTorch, and released under Apache License 2.0 at the link https://github.com/RUCAIBox/TextBox.