TimE: A Multi-level Benchmark for Temporal Reasoning of LLMs in Real-World Scenarios

Shaohang Wei, Wei Li, Feifan Song, Wen Luo, Tianyi Zhuang, Haochen Tan, Zhijiang Guo, Houfeng Wang

Keywords: Large Language Models, Temporal Reasoning

Abstract: Temporal reasoning is pivotal for Large Language Models (LLMs) to comprehend the real world. However, existing works neglect the real-world challenges for temporal reasoning: (1) intensive temporal information, (2) fast-changing event dynamics, and (3) complex temporal dependencies in social interactions. To bridge this gap, we propose a multi-level benchmark TimE, designed for temporal reasoning in real-world scenarios. TimE consists of 38,522 QA pairs, covering 3 levels with 11 fine-grained sub-tasks. This benchmark encompasses 3 sub-datasets reflecting different real-world challenges: TimE-Wiki, TimE-News, and TimE-Dial. We conduct extensive experiments on reasoning models and non-reasoning models. And we conducted an in-depth analysis of temporal reasoning performance across diverse real-world scenarios and tasks, and summarized the impact of test-time scaling on temporal reasoning capabilities. Additionally, we release TimE-Lite, a human-annotated subset to foster future research and standardized evaluation in temporal reasoning.

Dataset URL: https://huggingface.co/datasets/SylvainWei/TIME

Code URL: https://github.com/sylvain-wei/TIME

Primary Area: Datasets & Benchmarks for applications in language modeling and vision language modeling

Submission Number: 1178