Unveiling LLM Evaluation Focused on Metrics: Challenges and Solutions

Abstract

Natural Language Processing (NLP) is witnessing a remarkable breakthrough driven by the success of Large Language Models (LLMs). LLMs have gained significant attention across academia and industry for their versatile applications in text generation, question answering, and text summarization. As the landscape of NLP evolves with an increasing number of domain-specific LLMs employing diverse techniques and trained on various corpus, evaluating performance of these models becomes paramount. To quantify the performance, it's crucial to have a comprehensive grasp of existing metrics. Among the evaluation, metrics which quantifying the performance of LLMs play a pivotal role. This paper offers a comprehensive exploration of LLM evaluation from a metrics perspective, providing insights into the selection and interpretation of metrics currently in use. Our main goal is to elucidate their mathematical formulations and statistical interpretations. We shed light on the application of these metrics using recent Biomedical LLMs. Additionally, we offer a succinct comparison of these metrics, aiding researchers in selecting appropriate metrics for diverse tasks. The overarching goal is to furnish researchers with a pragmatic guide for effective LLM evaluation and metric selection, thereby advancing the understanding and application of these large language models.