Paper ID: 2410.04541

On Evaluating LLMs' Capabilities as Functional Approximators: A Bayesian Perspective

Shoaib Ahmed Siddiqui, Yanzhi Chen, Juyeon Heo, Menglin Xia, Adrian Weller

Recent works have successfully applied Large Language Models (LLMs) to function modeling tasks. However, the reasons behind this success remain unclear. In this work, we propose a new evaluation framework to comprehensively assess LLMs' function modeling abilities. By adopting a Bayesian perspective of function modeling, we discover that LLMs are relatively weak in understanding patterns in raw data, but excel at utilizing prior knowledge about the domain to develop a strong understanding of the underlying function. Our findings offer new insights about the strengths and limitations of LLMs in the context of function modeling.

Submitted: Oct 6, 2024