ADeLe v1.0: A battery for AI Evaluation with explanatory and predictive power

This is a collaborative community, initiated by researchers at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence, University of Cambridge, for the use and extension of ADeLe v1.0, a battery for AI evaluation with explanatory and predictive power, currently focusing on LLMs.

The ADeLe (Annotated-Demand-Levels) battery includes 63 tasks from 20 benchmarks and was introduced in the original paper. This battery was annotated using 18 rubrics for Demand-Level-Annotation (DeLeAn v1.0) of general scales.

ADeLe, for the first time, enables researchers to infer the ability profiles of LLMs, comprehensively explaining what they can and cannot do. This makes it possible to understand and extrapolate benchmark results, and thus to anticipate when and where they will perform reliably and safely at instance-level. At the same time, ADeLe can be extended by applying the DeLeAn rubric to new benchmarks and thus understanding what they really measure. The figure below (from the original paper) shows this process.

Our methodology

From ARIV LINK.

Demand annotation of benchmarks on general scales


The considered dimensions

The DeLeAn rubrics consider 7 broad capabilities from Tolan et al. (2021) grounded in cognitive science (such as the Cattell–Horn–Carroll theory) and applicable to LLMs, and add subdimensions (leading to 11). It also includes domain ‘knowledge’ (with 5 subdimensions) and 2 ‘extraneous’ dimensions: Atypicality and Volume, to account for elements that make the task more challenging independently of primordial or knowledge demands. An additional dimension, Unguessability, is computed algorithmically by considering the number of choices, instead of using a rubric.

Dimension (Broad) Dimension
(Specific)
Description of Demands
AS Attention and Scan AS Attention and Scan Focus on or locate specific elements within a given stream of information or environment in the whole process of solving a task.
CE Comprehension and Expression CEc Verbal Comprehension Understand text, stories or the semantic content of other representations of ideas in different formats or modalities.
CEe Verbal Expression Generate and articulate ideas, stories, or semantic content in different formats or modalities.
CL Conceptualisation, Learning and Abstraction CL Conceptualisation, Learning and Abstraction Build new concepts, engage in inductive and analogical reasoning, map relationships between domains, and generate abstractions from concrete examples.
MC Metacognition and Critical Thinking MCr Identifying Relevant Information Recognise what information helps solve the task or does not, and how this recognition process unfolds as they work toward the solution.
MCt Critical Thinking Processes Monitor or regulate multiple thought processes to answer the question effectively, ranging from simple recall to high-level critical thinking.
MCu Calibrating Knowns and Unknowns Recognise the boundaries of one's knowledge and confidently identify what one knows they know, knows they don't know, or is uncertain about.
MS Mind Modelling and Social Cognition MS Mind Modelling and Social Cognition Model the minds of other agents or reasoning about how the beliefs, desires, intentions, and emotions of multiple other agents might interact to determine future behaviours.
QL Quantitative and Logical Reasoning QLl Logical Reasoning Match and apply rules, procedures, algorithms or systematic steps to premises to solve problems, derive conclusions and make decisions.
QLq Quantitative Reasoning Work with and reason about quantities, numbers, and numerical relationships.
SN Spatial Reasoning and Navigation SNs Spatio-physical Reasoning Understand spatial relationships between objects and predicting physical interactions.
KN Knowledge KNa Knowledge of Applied Sciences Knowledge or conceptual understanding in applied sciences (e.g., medicine, law, education, business, agriculture, engineering except IT).
KNc Customary Everyday Knowledge Knowledge in information that most people in a given society typically acquire through daily life experiences, social interactions, and media.
KNf Knowledge of Formal Sciences Knowledge or conceptual understanding in formal sciences (e.g., mathematics, logic, computer science, statistics).
KNn Knowledge of Natural Sciences Knowledge or conceptual understanding in natural sciences (e.g., physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, earth sciences, ecology).
KNs Knowledge of Social Sciences Knowledge or conceptual understanding in social sciences and humanities (e.g., history, psychology, sociology, literature, art, philosophy).
AT Atypicality AT Atypicality How uncommon the task is or how unlikely it is that the instance has appeared in various sources (internet, textbooks, tests).
VO Volume VO Volume Proportional to the logarithm of the time a fully competent human needs to read and complete the task in ideal conditions, excluding interruptions.
UG Unguessability UG Unguessability The chance of error (percentage) of a task if following obvious cues or by random guess.

The rubrics

Below we show the rubrics for each dimension.

The ADeLe battery

The ADeLe battery is obtained by running the DeLeAn rubrics on 63 tasks from 20 benchmarks, shown below. Only a subset of instances from each task was included in the benchmark (see the original paper for details).

Source Benchmark Task #Instances
AGIEval Civil Service Examination LogiQA-en 408
GRE & GMAT AQuA-RAT 203
LSAT LSAT-AR 187
LSAT-LR 470
LSAT-RC 253
SAT SAT-En 196
SAT-Math 214
ChemLLMBench ChemLLMBench Molecule Captioning 160
Molecule Design 295
Name Prediction 476
Reaction Prediction 412
Retrosynthesis 380
LiveBench Data Analysis CTA 33
Language Connections 29
Math AMPS Hard 69
Math Competition 78
Olympiad 26
Reasoning Spatial 34
Zebra Puzzle 22
MMLU-Pro MMLU-Pro Biology 447
Business 410
Chemistry 368
Computer Science 345
Economics 428
Engineering 296
Health 411
History 304
Law 362
Math 425
Other 429
Philosophy 402
Physics 377
Psychology 427
MedCalcBench MedCalcBench Date 27
Diagnosis 14
Dosage 20
Lab 180
Physical 214
Risk 84
Severity 17
OmniMath OmniMath Algebra 337
Applied Mathematics 302
Calculus 30
Discrete Mathematics 314
Geometry 329
Number Theory 322
Precalculus 30
SciBench SciBench Chemistry 142
Math 105
Physics 108
TimeBench Date Arithmetic Date Arithmetic 493
MCTACO MCTACO 205
MenatQA MenatQA-Counterfactual 130
MenatQA-Order 157
MenatQA-Scope 393
TempReason TempReason-L2 318
TempReason-L3 339
TimeDial TimeDial 340
TimeQA TimeQA-explicit 379
TimeQA-implicit 348
TruthQuest TruthQuest E 344
I 371
S 340


Demand distribution of ADeLe: what do the benchmarks really test for?

The annotations obtained with the DeLeAn rubrics allow to identify what demands the benchmarks composing ADeLe are loaded on. The following image (from the original paper) shows the overall distribution of demands on the ADeLe battery.

Demands on the overall collection ADELE

Demands for each of the benchmarks

Below, you can see the demand distribution for each of the 20 benchmarks in the ADeLe battery separately (from the original paper).

Expand Demands for each of the benchmarks


Correlation across demands in the ADeLe collection

The annotations obtained with the DeLeAn rubrics also allow to identify what demands are correlated with one another, which is important to understand what benchmarks really measure. The plot below shows correlation values (from the original paper).

Expand Correlation across demands in the ADELE collection

Profiling LLM capabilities

By testing a LLM on the ADeLe benchmark, an ability "profile" can be extracted, representing an ability level for each considered dimension. The plot below shows the profile of the LLMs considered in the original paper.

Profiles of the considered LLMs

How are profiles obtained?

From the annotated ADeLe battery and the instance-level results of a LLM, the ability value for each dimension is obtained by:

  1. plotting the success probability of the LLM at increasing demand levels (characteristic curve). A dominant strategy is used to remove confounders: at any demand level, only instances of ADeLe where all other dimensions have demand lower than that of the considered dimension are kept.
  2. The ability score is then defined as the x-value where a logistic fit is at 0.5.
See the image below (from the original paper) for a visualization.

Characteristic curve


Characteristic curves for all considered LLMs and demands

Below, you can see the characteristic curves for all considered demands and LLMs from the original paper.

How to contribute

We encourage and welcome inputs from others in the research community. Here are some ways you can help out:

  • Try It Out: Use the battery or rubrics and share your instance-level results with us, including the information about instance_id, prompt, LLM response, and accuracy of the response.
  • Expand the ADeLe Battery: Apply the rubrics to your preferred or new benchmarks.
  • Enhance the DeLeAn Rubrics: Expand the rubrics to include other levels or dimensions.
We are working on easier ways for you to contribute directly to this initiative. In the meantime, please get in touch at jh2135 AT cam.ac.uk if you’re interested in joining the effort: jh2135 AT cam.ac.uk.

BibTeX

Please consider citing the original work if you found it useful:

@misc{zhou2025generalscalesunlockai,
      title={General Scales Unlock AI Evaluation with Explanatory and Predictive Power},
      author={Lexin Zhou and Lorenzo Pacchiardi and Fernando Martínez-Plumed and Katherine M. Collins and Yael Moros-Daval and Seraphina Zhang and Qinlin Zhao and Yitian Huang and Luning Sun and Jonathan E. Prunty and Zongqian Li and Pablo Sánchez-García and Kexin Jiang Chen and Pablo A. M. Casares and Jiyun Zu and John Burden and Behzad Mehrbakhsh and David Stillwell and Manuel Cebrian and Jindong Wang and Peter Henderson and Sherry Tongshuang Wu and Patrick C. Kyllonen and Lucy Cheke and Xing Xie and José Hernández-Orallo},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2503.06378},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.AI},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.06378},
}

Acknowledgements

This research project has benefitted from the Microsoft Accelerate Foundation Models Research (AFMR) grant program.