Abstract
Recent work found that LLMs are sensitive to a wide range of arbitrary prompt dimensions, including the type of delimiters, answer enumerators, instruction wording, and more. This throws into question popular single-prompt evaluation practices. We present DOVE (Dataset Of Variation Evaluation) a large-scale dataset containing prompt perturbations of various evaluation benchmarks. In contrast to previous work, we examine LLM sensitivity from an holistic perspective, and assess the joint effects of perturbations along various dimensions, resulting in thousands of perturbations per instance. We evaluate several model families against DOVE, leading to several findings, including efficient methods for choosing well-performing prompts, observing that few-shot examples reduce sensitivity, and identifying instances which are inherently hard across all perturbations. DOVE consists of more than 250M prompt perturbations and model outputs, which we make publicly available to spur a community-wide effort toward meaningful, robust, and efficient evaluation.
| Original language | English |
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| Title of host publication | Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics |
| Subtitle of host publication | ACL 2025 |
| Editors | Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar |
| Publisher | Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) |
| Pages | 11744-11763 |
| Number of pages | 20 |
| ISBN (Electronic) | 9798891762565 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - 2025 |
| Event | 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2025 - Vienna, Austria Duration: 27 Jul 2025 → 1 Aug 2025 |
Publication series
| Name | Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics |
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| ISSN (Print) | 0736-587X |
Conference
| Conference | 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, ACL 2025 |
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| Country/Territory | Austria |
| City | Vienna |
| Period | 27/07/25 → 1/08/25 |
Bibliographical note
Publisher Copyright:© 2025 Association for Computational Linguistics.