Challenge: Existing evaluation methods for large language models (LLMs) are inadequate to provide solid conclusions for key experiments such as data ablation and scaling law.
Approach: They propose a method specifically designed to optimize the evaluation of base models by incorporating two innovations: In-Context Light-instruction Prompt and Blank-ppl for multi-choice tasks with candidate options.
Outcome: The proposed method significantly improves stability and consistency of evaluations during pre-training and consistency between base and instruct models.

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Challenge: a finetuned model may be better base models than the vanilla pretrained model . this scheme, often referred to as intertraining, is the focus of the present work .
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Cost-effective Selection of Pretraining Data: A Case Study of Pretraining BERT on Social Media (2020.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Recent studies show that domain-specific BERT models can be improved when in-domain data is used for pretraining.
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What Really Matters for Table LLMs? A Meta-Evaluation of Model and Data Effects (2026.findings-eacl)

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Challenge: a series of paradigm shifts have come with distinct characteristics and challenges associated with table modeling.
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Are LLM-based Evaluators Confusing NLG Quality Criteria? (2024.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing studies show that LLMs confuse evaluation criteria, which reduces their reliability.
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What is the best recipe for character-level encoder-only modelling? (2023.acl-long)

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Challenge: aims to benchmark recent progress in language understanding models that output contextualised representations at the character level.
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A Controlled Reevaluation of Coreference Resolution Models (2024.lrec-main)

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Challenge: a pretrained language model is used in state-of-the-art coreference resolution models.
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Contextual Embeddings: When Are They Worth It? (2020.acl-main)

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Challenge: In recent years, rich contextual embeddings have enabled rapid progress on benchmarks like GLUE, but require significant computational resources during pretraining and during downstream task training and inference.
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The Progress Illusion: Revisiting meta-evaluation standards of LLM evaluators (2025.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: LLM judges have gained popularity as an inexpensive and performant substitute for human evaluation.
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Benchmarking Meta-embeddings: What Works and What Does Not (2021.findings-emnlp)

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Challenge: Existing methods to build meta-embeddings have been evaluated using a variety of methods and datasets, which makes it difficult to draw meaningful conclusions regarding the merits of each approach.
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RADDLE: An Evaluation Benchmark and Analysis Platform for Robust Task-oriented Dialog Systems (2021.acl-long)

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Challenge: Existing task-oriented dialog systems are less than satisfactory in robustness evaluation . existing systems are weak in robustity evaluation based on pre-training and fine-tuning .
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