Beyond Prompts: Dynamic Conversational Benchmarking of Large Language Models

Neural Information Processing Systems 

We introduce a dynamic benchmarking system for conversational agents that evaluates their performance through a single, simulated, and lengthy user \leftrightarrow agent interaction. The interaction is a conversation between the user and agent, where multiple tasks are introduced and then undertaken concurrently. We context switch regularly to interleave the tasks, which constructs a realistic testing scenario in which we assess the Long-Term Memory, Continual Learning, and Information Integration capabilities of the agents. Results from both proprietary and open-source Large-Language Models show that LLMs in general perform well on single-task interactions, but they struggle on the same tasks when they are interleaved. Notably, short-context LLMs supplemented with an LTM system perform as well as or better than those with larger contexts.