Paper ID: 2412.18011

StructTest: Benchmarking LLMs' Reasoning through Compositional Structured Outputs

Hailin Chen, Fangkai Jiao, Mathieu Ravaut, Nawshad Farruque, Xuan Phi Nguyen, Chengwei Qin, Manan Dey, Bosheng Ding, Caiming Xiong, Shafiq Joty, Yingbo Zhou

The rapid development of large language models (LLMs) necessitates robust, unbiased, and scalable methods for evaluating their capabilities. However, human annotations are expensive to scale, model-based evaluations are prone to biases in answer style, while target-answer-based benchmarks are vulnerable to data contamination and cheating. To address these limitations, we propose StructTest, a novel benchmark that evaluates LLMs on their ability to produce compositionally specified structured outputs as an unbiased, cheap-to-run and difficult-to-cheat measure. The evaluation is done deterministically by a rule-based evaluator, which can be easily extended to new tasks. By testing structured outputs across diverse task domains -- including Summarization, Code, HTML and Math -- we demonstrate that StructTest serves as a good proxy for general reasoning abilities, as producing structured outputs often requires internal logical reasoning. We believe that StructTest offers a critical, complementary approach to objective and robust model evaluation.

Submitted: Dec 23, 2024