arXiv AI

SyntaxBench: A Statistical Diagnostic Framework for Character-Level Reasoning in Large Language Models

SyntaxBench is a diagnostic benchmark and statistical evaluation framework for character‑level reasoning in large language models, comprising five core tasks—character counting, letter containment, palindrome detection, edit distance, and longest‑string selection—and a harder substring‑extraction stress test called index_to_span. The benchmark uses paired English and random‑string inputs, zero‑, one‑, and four‑shot prompts, and evaluates models from 2B to 32B parameters across multiple reasoning modes. It reports a wide range of metrics, including exact‑match and relaxed accuracy, Cohen’s kappa, McNemar tests, bootstrap confidence intervals, Kendall’s tau, class‑conditional metrics, tokenization analysis, and multiple‑comparison‑corrected tests.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

Manac\'a-1B: An Open, Reproducible Brazilian-Portuguese Language Model and a Tokenizer-Aware, Paired Evaluation

Manacá-1B is a 1.72‑billion‑parameter, open decoder‑only language model trained from scratch for Brazilian Portuguese, released with a fully containerized, reproducible training pipeline and complete logs. The authors evaluate it against nine open baselines on four Portuguese benchmarks, reporting standard errors and paired significance tests, and find that Manacá-1B outperforms smaller models on LAMBADA‑PT while remaining competitive on commonsense completion. They also uncover a tokenizer‑related evaluation pitfall that can drastically lower accuracy and provide a simple fix, releasing all code, logs, and corrected tokenizer for full reproducibility.

By Bruno Leonardo Santos Menezes, Carlos Leonardo Souza Cardoso, Fabio Andre Machado Porto
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 5

M-GATE: Multilingual Grammar, Accuracy in Translation, and Efficiency Benchmark for Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 03803v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Multilingual language models are deployed across a hundred or more languages, yet most benchmarks test whether a model can perform a task _in_ a language rather than whether it commands the language itself, conflating fluency with proficiency.

By Tom\'a\v{s} Burkert, Angelika Peljak-{\L}api\'nska, David Zelen\'y
arXiv AI
Aug 17

The Metacognitive Bottleneck: Japanese Riddles Reveal Fundamental Limits of Machine Insight and Self-Evaluation in Reasoning AI

arXiv:2509. 14704v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Benchmark saturation and training-data contamination increasingly obscure whether reported gains in large language models (LLMs) reflect genuine advances in reasoning or familiarity with recurring patterns in benchmark problems.

By Masaharu Mizumoto, Dat Nguyen, Zhiheng Han, Xingfu Li, Yo Nakawake, Le Minh Nguyen
arXiv AI
Sep 25

PROOF: Profiling Reliability of Object-Level Facts in Large Language Models

PROOF is a benchmark that profiles the reliability of object-level facts in instruction-tuned language models by converting a frozen Wikidata snapshot into 18,486 English multiple-choice questions grounded in 11,779 semantic facts across 101 classes, 392 properties, and 14 domains. Each question includes an explicit "I don't know" option, a "No correct option" control, and nine controlled formulations, with 1,849 questions designed as no-correct-option traps. The study evaluates 18 open-weight model deployments on 166,374 prompts, revealing wide variability in factual accuracy, sensitivity to wording changes, and the impact of decoder perturbations.

By Andrei Chetvergov, Mikhail Solovev, Timofei Sivoraksha, Stepan Ukolov, Valeriia Kuschenko, Alexander Evseev, Sergey Bolovtsov
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Probability is Not Enough: Exploring and Counting Divergent Tokens for Reasoning Uncertainty Quantification in LLMs

The paper introduces Divergent Token Confidence (DTC), a method that estimates large language model confidence by counting tokens where two models strongly disagree during decoding. DTC uses Jensen-Shannon divergence between next-token distributions along the same reasoning trajectory and shows a near-negative correlation with answer accuracy. Experiments on multiple model families and six mathematical benchmarks demonstrate that DTC improves calibration over traditional probability-based and verbalized baselines, achieving lower expected calibration errors in both white-box and black-box settings.

By Feiyang Li, Shengjing Liu, Qi Zhan, Sijie Cheng, Weiqing Wang, Hongwen Chen, Yuxuan Yang, Wen Wang, Yile Wang, Hui Huang