Evaluating Ill-Defined Tasks in Large Language Models

Yi Zhou, Basel Shbita

Keywords: large language models, evaluation, ill-defined tasks, benchmarking, llm-as-judge, instruction following, diagramming

TL;DR: We show that benchmarking fails as a diagnostic measurement tool for evaluating large language models on ill-defined tasks. We present two case-studies and highlight how better evaluation design can expose meaningful and actionable insights.

Abstract: Many evaluations of Large Language Models (LLMs) target tasks that are inherently ill-defined, with unclear input and output spaces and ambiguous success criteria. We analyze why existing evaluation benchmarks and metrics fail to provide reliable or diagnostic signals of model capability for such tasks. We examine two case studies: Complex Instruction Following (CIF), where we identify recurring issues including limited coverage of real-world instruction complexity, sensitivity to instruction phrasing, inconsistent and non-comparable metrics, and instability introduced by LLM-based judges; and Natural Language to Mermaid Sequence Diagrams (NL2Mermaid), where we show how multi-faceted evaluation criteria can yield actionable insights beyond aggregate scores. Together, these case studies show that current evaluations frequently conflate distinct failure modes, yielding scores that are unstable, non-diagnostic, and difficult to act upon. Our findings expose fundamental limitations in existing evaluation practices for ill-defined tasks and motivate more robust, interpretable evaluation designs.

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Submission Number: 18