2025
pdf
bib
abs
Exposing the Achilles’ Heel: Evaluating LLMs Ability to Handle Mistakes in Mathematical Reasoning
Joykirat Singh
|
Akshay Nambi
|
Vibhav Vineet
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly impacted the field of Math Word Problems (MWPs), transforming how these problems are approached and solved, particularly in educational contexts. However, existing evaluations often focus on final accuracy, neglecting the critical aspect of reasoning capabilities. This work addresses that gap by evaluating LLMs’ abilities to detect and correct reasoning mistakes. We present a novel dataset, MWP-MISTAKE, containing MWPs with both correct and incorrect reasoning steps generated through rule-based methods and smaller language models. Our comprehensive benchmarking of state-of-the-art models such as GPT-4o and GPT4 uncovers important insights into their strengths and limitations. While GPT-4o excels in mistake detection and rectification, gaps remain, particularly in handling complex datasets and novel problems. Additionally, we identify concerns with data contamination and memorization, which affect LLM reliability in real-world applications. While OpenAI’ O1 model demonstrates 90% accuracy in reasoning and final answers on complex tasks, it remains weak in mistake detection. Our findings highlight the need for improved reasoning evaluations and suggest ways to enhance LLM generalization and robustness in math problem-solving.
pdf
bib
abs
Bridging the Language Gap: Dynamic Learning Strategies for Improving Multilingual Performance in LLMs
Somnath Kumar
|
Vaibhav Balloli
|
Mercy Ranjit
|
Kabir Ahuja
|
Sunayana Sitaram
|
Kalika Bali
|
Tanuja Ganu
|
Akshay Nambi
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized various domains but still struggle with non-Latin scripts and low-resource languages. This paper addresses the critical challenge of improving multilingual performance without extensive fine-tuning. We introduce a novel dynamic learning approach that optimizes prompt strategy, embedding model, and LLM per query at runtime. By adapting configurations dynamically, our method achieves significant improvements over static, best and random baselines. It operates efficiently in both offline and online settings, generalizing seamlessly across new languages and datasets. Leveraging Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) with state-of-the-art multilingual embeddings, we achieve superior task performance across diverse linguistic contexts. Through systematic investigation and evaluation across18 diverse languages using popular question-answering (QA) datasets we show our approach results in 10-15% improvements in multilingual performance over pre-trained models and 4x gains compared to fine-tuned, language-specific models.
pdf
bib
abs
PromptWizard: Optimizing Prompts via Task-Aware, Feedback-Driven Self-Evolution
Eshaan Agarwal
|
Raghav Magazine
|
Joykirat Singh
|
Vivek Dani
|
Tanuja Ganu
|
Akshay Nambi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025
Large language models (LLMs) have transformed AI across diverse domains, with prompting being central to their success in guiding model outputs. However, manual prompt engineering is both labor-intensive and domain-specific, necessitating the need for automated solutions. We introduce PromptWizard, a novel, fully automated framework for discrete prompt optimization, utilizing a self-evolving, self-adapting mechanism. Through a feedback-driven critique and synthesis process, PromptWizard achieves an effective balance between exploration and exploitation, iteratively refining both prompt instructions and in-context examples to generate human-readable, task-specific prompts. This guided approach systematically improves prompt quality, resulting in superior performance across 45 tasks. PromptWizard excels even with limited training data, smaller LLMs, and various LLM architectures. Additionally, our cost analysis reveals a substantial reduction in API calls, token usage, and overall cost, demonstrating PromptWizard’s efficiency, scalability, and advantages over existing prompt optimization strategies.
pdf
bib
abs
Multimodal Needle in a Haystack: Benchmarking Long-Context Capability of Multimodal Large Language Models
Hengyi Wang
|
Haizhou Shi
|
Shiwei Tan
|
Weiyi Qin
|
Wenyuan Wang
|
Tunyu Zhang
|
Akshay Nambi
|
Tanuja Ganu
|
Hao Wang
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Multimodal Large Language Models (MLLMs) have shown significant promise in various applications, leading to broad interest from researchers and practitioners alike. However, a comprehensive evaluation of their long-context capabilities remains underexplored. To address these gaps, we introduce the MultiModal Needle-in-a-haystack (MMNeedle) benchmark, specifically designed to assess the long-context capabilities of MLLMs. Besides multi-image input, we employ image stitching to further increase the input context length, and develop a protocol to automatically generate labels for sub-image level retrieval. Essentially, MMNeedle evaluates MLLMs by stress-testing their capability to locate a target sub-image (needle) within a set of images (haystack) based on textual instructions and descriptions of image contents. This setup necessitates an advanced understanding of extensive visual contexts and effective information retrieval within long-context image inputs. With this benchmark, we evaluate state-of-the-art MLLMs, encompassing both API-based and open-source models. The findings reveal that GPT-4o consistently surpasses other models in long-context scenarios, but suffers from hallucination problems in negative samples, i.e., when needles are not in the haystacks. Our comprehensive long-context evaluation of MLLMs also sheds lights on the considerable performance gap between API-based and open-source models. All the code, data, and instructions required to reproduce the main results are available at https://github.com/Wang-ML-Lab/multimodal-needle-in-a-haystack.
2023
pdf
bib
abs
MEGA: Multilingual Evaluation of Generative AI
Kabir Ahuja
|
Harshita Diddee
|
Rishav Hada
|
Millicent Ochieng
|
Krithika Ramesh
|
Prachi Jain
|
Akshay Nambi
|
Tanuja Ganu
|
Sameer Segal
|
Mohamed Ahmed
|
Kalika Bali
|
Sunayana Sitaram
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Generative AI models have shown impressive performance on many Natural Language Processing tasks such as language understanding, reasoning, and language generation. An important question being asked by the AI community today is about the capabilities and limits of these models, and it is clear that evaluating generative AI is very challenging. Most studies on generative LLMs have been restricted to English and it is unclear how capable these models are at understanding and generating text in other languages. We present the first comprehensive benchmarking of generative LLMs - MEGA, which evaluates models on standard NLP benchmarks, covering 16 NLP datasets across 70 typologically diverse languages. We compare the performance of generative LLMs including Chat-GPT and GPT-4 to State of the Art (SOTA) non-autoregressive models on these tasks to determine how well generative models perform compared to the previous generation of LLMs. We present a thorough analysis of the performance of models across languages and tasks and discuss challenges in improving the performance of generative LLMs on low-resource languages. We create a framework for evaluating generative LLMs in the multilingual setting and provide directions for future progress in the field.