Multiple-choice questions (MCQ) are frequently used to assess large language models (LLMs). Typically, an LLM is given a question and selects the answer deemed most probable after adjustments for factors like length. Unfortunately, LLMs may inherently favor certain answer choice IDs, such as A/B/C/D, due to inherent biases of priori unbalanced probabilities, influencing the prediction of answers based on these IDs. Previous research has introduced methods to reduce this ''selection bias'' by simply permutating options on a few test samples and applying to new ones. Another problem of MCQ is the lottery ticket choice by ''random guessing''. The LLM does not learn particular knowledge, but the option is guessed correctly. This situation is especially serious for those small-scale LLMs. To address them, a more thorough approach involves shifting from MCQ to open-style questions, which can fundamentally eliminate selection bias and random guessing issues. However, transitioning causes its own set of challenges in (1) identifying suitable open-style questions and (2) validating the correctness of LLM open-style responses against human-annotated ground-truths. This work aims to tackle these significant difficulties, and establish a new LLM evaluation benchmark through entirely open-style questions. Consequently, we introduce the Open-LLM-Leaderboard to track various LLMs' performance and reflect true capability of them, such as GPT-4o/4/3.5, Claude 3, Gemini, etc. Our code and dataset are available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/Open-LLM-Leaderboard.

This paper introduces 26 guiding principles designed to streamline the process of querying and prompting large language models. Our goal is to simplify the underlying concepts of formulating questions for various scales of large language models, examining their abilities, and enhancing user comprehension on the behaviors of different scales of large language models when feeding into different prompts. Extensive experiments are conducted on LLaMA-1/2 (7B, 13B and 70B), GPT-3.5/4 to verify the effectiveness of the proposed principles on instructions and prompts design. We hope that this work can provide a better guide for researchers working on the prompting of large language models. Project page is available at https://github.com/VILA-Lab/ATLAS.

We introduce Jais and Jais-chat, new state-of-the-art Arabic-centric foundation and instruction-tuned open generative large language models (LLMs). The models are based on the GPT-3 decoder-only architecture and are pretrained on a mixture of Arabic and English texts, including source code in various programming languages. With 13 billion parameters, they demonstrate better knowledge and reasoning capabilities in Arabic than any existing open Arabic and multilingual models by a sizable margin, based on extensive evaluation. Moreover, the models are competitive in English compared to English-centric open models of similar size, despite being trained on much less English data. We provide a detailed description of the training, the tuning, the safety alignment, and the evaluation of the models. We release two open versions of the model -- the foundation Jais model, and an instruction-tuned Jais-chat variant -- with the aim of promoting research on Arabic LLMs. Available at https://huggingface.co/inception-mbzuai/jais-13b-chat