Is Your LLM Outdated? Benchmarking LLMs & Alignment Algorithms for Time-Sensitive Knowledge
Seyed Mahed Mousavi, Simone Alghisi, Giuseppe Riccardi
We study the appropriateness of Large Language Models (LLMs) as knowledge repositories. We focus on the challenge of maintaining LLMs' factual knowledge up-to-date over time. Motivated by the lack of studies on identifying outdated knowledge within LLMs, we design and develop a dynamic benchmark with up-to-date ground truth answers for each target factual question. We evaluate eighteen open-source and closed-source state-of-the-art LLMs on time-sensitive knowledge retrieved in real-time from Wikidata. We select time-sensitive domain facts in politics, sports, and organizations, and estimate the recency of the information learned by the model during pre-training\fine-tuning. In the second contribution, we evaluate the effectiveness of knowledge editing methods for aligning LLMs with up-to-date factual knowledge and compare their performance with Retrieval Augmented Generation. The dynamic benchmark is designed to be used as-is to assess LLMs's up-to-dateness, as well as to be extended to other domains by sharing the code, the dataset, as well as evaluation and visualization scripts.