Daily Papers

As the usage of large language models for problems outside of simple text understanding or generation increases, assessing their abilities and limitations becomes crucial. While significant progress has been made in this area over the last few years, most research has focused on benchmarking English, leaving other languages underexplored. This makes evaluating the reasoning and robustness level of language models in Ukrainian particularly challenging. The purpose of this work is to establish a comprehensive benchmark for the reasoning capabilities evaluation of large language models in the Ukrainian language. This paper presents the ZNO-Eval benchmark based on real exam tasks from Ukraine's standardized educational testing system: the External Independent Evaluation and the National Multi-subject Test. With single-answer options, multiple-choice, matching, and open-ended questions from diverse subjects, including Ukrainian language, mathematics, history, and geography, this dataset paves the way toward a thorough analysis of reasoning capabilities across different domains and complexities. Evaluation of several well-known language models, such as GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT-4o, GPT-4-Turbo, Mistral Large, Claude 3 Opus, and Gemini-1.5 Pro on this benchmark demonstrated the superiority of GPT-4o in both common knowledge reasoning and intricate language tasks. At the same time, Gemini Pro and GPT-4 Turbo excelled in the arithmetic domain, leading in single-answer and open-ended math problems. While all models were close to max performance in text-only common knowledge tasks like history and geography, there still is a gap for Ukrainian language and math, thus highlighting the importance of developing specialized language benchmarks for more accurate assessments of model capabilities and limitations across different languages and contexts.

Leading large language models have demonstrated impressive capabilities in reasoning-intensive tasks, such as standardized educational testing. However, they often require extensive training in low-resource settings with inaccessible infrastructure. Small or compact models, though more efficient, frequently lack sufficient support for underrepresented languages, leaving a performance gap in critical domains. This work explores the potential of parameter-efficient fine-tuning of compact open-weight language models to handle reasoning-intensive tasks in the underrepresented Ukrainian language, building on the findings of the ZNO-Eval benchmark. Parameter-efficient fine-tuning of LLaMA 3.1 (8 billion parameters), LLaMA 3.2 (3 billion parameters), and Gemma 2 (9 billion parameters) models on chain-of-thought solutions resulted in a modest test score improvement of up to 17.4% on complex matching tasks and 1.6% overall compared to tuning on answer letters alone, offering enhanced interpretability and robustness. In addition, the proposed tuning method with joint task topic and step-by-step solution generation outperforms standard chain-of-thought tuning in matching tasks and provides a 5.4% gain over the best LLaMA 3.2 model due to guiding the model to recall and apply domain-relevant information. Contrasting obtained results with zero-shot evaluations of leading open-weight and proprietary models such as Qwen, DeepSeek R1, OpenAI o1 and o3, Gemini, and Claude, highlight that fine-tuning LLaMA and Gemma models with 2,032 step-by-step solutions and 20 to 50 million trainable parameters on a single A100 GPU lets them outperform GPT-4o mini, Mistral Large, and larger open-weight models. This research also evaluates how merging the quantized adapter with the base model influences the generation quality. Source code and tuned models are available at https://github.com/NLPForUA/ZNO.