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Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models

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abstract

Language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities with increasing scale. Despite their potentially transformative impact, these new capabilities are as yet poorly characterized. In order to inform future research, prepare for disruptive new model capabilities, and ameliorate socially harmful effects, it is vital that we understand the present and near-future capabilities and limitations of language models. To address this challenge, we introduce the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark (BIG-bench). BIG-bench currently consists of 204 tasks, contributed by 450 authors across 132 institutions. Task topics are diverse, drawing problems from linguistics, childhood development, math, common-sense reasoning, biology, physics, social bias, software development, and beyond. BIG-bench focuses on tasks that are believed to be beyond the capabilities of current language models. We evaluate the behavior of OpenAI's GPT models, Google-internal dense transformer architectures, and Switch-style sparse transformers on BIG-bench, across model sizes spanning millions to hundreds of billions of parameters. In addition, a team of human expert raters performed all tasks in order to provide a strong baseline. Findings include: model performance and calibration both improve with scale, but are poor in absolute terms (and when compared with rater performance); performance is remarkably similar across model classes, though with benefits from sparsity; tasks that improve gradually and predictably commonly involve a large knowledge or memorization component, whereas tasks that exhibit "breakthrough" behavior at a critical scale often involve multiple steps or components, or brittle metrics; social bias typically increases with scale in settings with ambiguous context, but this can be improved with prompting.

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  • abstract Language models demonstrate both quantitative improvement and new qualitative capabilities with increasing scale. Despite their potentially transformative impact, these new capabilities are as yet poorly characterized. In order to inform future research, prepare for disruptive new model capabilities, and ameliorate socially harmful effects, it is vital that we understand the present and near-future capabilities and limitations of language models. To address this challenge, we introduce the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark (BIG-bench). BIG-bench currently consists of 204 tasks, contributed b

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NARRA-Gym for Evaluating Interactive Narrative Agents

cs.CL · 2026-05-08 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

NARRA-Gym is an executable benchmark that generates complete interactive narrative episodes from emotional seeds and logs full model trajectories to expose gaps in coherence, adaptation, and personalization that static story tests miss.

The Art of Scaling Reinforcement Learning Compute for LLMs

cs.LG · 2025-10-15 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

A 400k+ GPU-hour study shows RL scaling in LLMs follows predictable sigmoidal trajectories, with most design choices affecting efficiency rather than the performance asymptote, enabling accurate large-scale predictions via the ScaleRL recipe.

KTO: Model Alignment as Prospect Theoretic Optimization

cs.LG · 2024-02-02 · conditional · novelty 7.0

KTO aligns LLMs by directly maximizing prospect-theoretic utility on binary signals and matches or exceeds preference-based methods like DPO from 1B to 30B parameters.

C-Pack: Packed Resources For General Chinese Embeddings

cs.CL · 2023-09-14 · accept · novelty 7.0

C-Pack releases a new Chinese embedding benchmark, large training dataset, and optimized models that outperform priors by up to 10% on C-MTEB while also delivering English SOTA results.

Large Language Models as Optimizers

cs.LG · 2023-09-07 · unverdicted · novelty 7.0

Large language models can optimize by being prompted with histories of past solutions and scores to propose better ones, producing prompts that raise accuracy up to 8% on GSM8K and 50% on Big-Bench Hard over human-designed baselines.

ToxiREX: A Dataset on Toxic REasoning in ConteXt

cs.CL · 2026-06-26 · unverdicted · novelty 6.0

ToxiREX is a new dataset of 128k Reddit comments in six languages with hierarchical annotations for implicit toxicity in conversational context based on an existing reasoning schema.

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