Beyond the Answers: Reviewing the Rationality of Multiple Choice Question Answering for the Evaluation of Large Language Models

In the field of natural language processing (NLP), Large Language Models (LLMs) have precipitated a paradigm shift, markedly enhancing performance in natural language generation tasks. Despite these advancements, the comprehensive evaluation of LLMs remains an inevitable challenge for the community. Recently, the utilization of Multiple Choice Question Answering (MCQA) as a benchmark for LLMs has gained considerable traction. This study investigates the rationality of MCQA as an evaluation method for LLMs. If LLMs genuinely understand the semantics of questions, their performance should exhibit consistency across the varied configurations derived from the same questions. Contrary to this expectation, our empirical findings suggest a notable disparity in the consistency of LLM responses, which we define as REsponse VAriability Syndrome (REVAS) of the LLMs, indicating that current MCQA-based benchmarks may not adequately capture the true capabilities of LLMs, which underscores the need for more robust evaluation mechanisms in assessing the performance of LLMs.