# PAT-Questions: A Self-Updating Benchmark for Present-Anchored Temporal Question-Answering

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11034 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.11034/

## Key facts

- Cited by 15 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 24 of its 39 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Feb 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 24 of 24)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [ReAct: Synergizing Reasoning and Acting in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03629/) (2022)
- [Large Language Models are Zero-Shot Reasoners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11916/) (2022)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [MS MARCO: A Human Generated MAchine Reading COmprehension Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1611.09268/) (2016)
- [FreshLLMs: Refreshing Large Language Models with Search Engine Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.03214/) (2023)
- [Benchmarking Large Language Models in Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.01431/) (2023)
- [Time-Aware Language Models as Temporal Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.15110/) (2021)
- [RealTime QA: What's the Answer Right Now?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.13332/) (2022)
- [A Dataset for Answering Time-Sensitive Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.06314/) (2021)
- [SituatedQA: Incorporating Extra-Linguistic Contexts into QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.06157/) (2021)
- [Rethinking with Retrieval: Faithful Large Language Model Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00303/) (2022)
- [StreamingQA: A Benchmark for Adaptation to New Knowledge over Time in Question Answering Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.11388/) (2022)
- [Question Answering Over Temporal Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.01515/) (2021)
- [Can ChatGPT Replace Traditional KBQA Models? An In-depth Analysis of the Question Answering Performance of the GPT LLM Family](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.07992/) (2023)
- [Complex Temporal Question Answering on Knowledge Graphs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.08935/) (2021)
- [TEQUILA: Temporal Question Answering over Knowledge Bases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.03650/) (2019)
- [Self-prompted Chain-of-Thought on Large Language Models for Open-domain Multi-hop Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.13552/) (2023)
- [Multi-Source Test-Time Adaptation as Dueling Bandits for Extractive Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.06779/) (2023)
- [NORMY: Non-Uniform History Modeling for Open Retrieval Conversational Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.04548/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 15 of 15)

- [DeepScholar-Bench: A Live Benchmark and Automated Evaluation for Generative Research Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.20033/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models Meet Knowledge Graphs for Question Answering: Synthesis and Opportunities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20099/) (2025)
- [Cross-Modal Safety Alignment: Is textual unlearning all you need?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.02575/) (2024)
- [UnSeenTimeQA: Time-Sensitive Question-Answering Beyond LLMs' Memorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03525/) (2024)
- [It's High Time: A Survey of Temporal Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.20243/) (2025)
- [EvoWiki: Evaluating LLMs on Evolving Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.13582/) (2024)
- [HoH: A Dynamic Benchmark for Evaluating the Impact of Outdated Information on Retrieval-Augmented Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.04800/) (2025)
- [Language Modeling with Editable External Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11830/) (2024)
- [RARE: Retrieval-Aware Robustness Evaluation for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.00789/) (2025)
- [TRAVELER: A Benchmark for Evaluating Temporal Reasoning across Vague, Implicit and Explicit References](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01325/) (2025)
- [Review-Then-Refine: A Dynamic Framework for Multi-Hop Question Answering with Temporal Adaptability](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15101/) (2024)
- [The benefits of query-based KGQA systems for complex and temporal questions in LLM era](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11954/) (2025)
- [Diagnosing Retrieval Bias Under Multiple In-Context Knowledge Updates in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.12271/) (2026)
- [Benchmarking Real-Time Question Answering via Executable Code Workflows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.16349/) (2026)
- [ChronoQG: Towards a Temporally Expressive and Hop-Bounded Benchmark for Temporal Knowledge Graph Question Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.14770/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Existing work on Temporal Question Answering (TQA) has predominantly focused on questions anchored to specific timestamps or events (e.g. "Who was the US president in 1970?"). Little work has studied questions whose temporal context is relative to the present time (e.g. "Who was the previous US president?"). We refer to this problem as Present-Anchored Temporal QA (PATQA). PATQA poses unique challenges: (1) large language models (LLMs) may have outdated knowledge, (2) complex temporal relationships (e.g. 'before', 'previous') are hard to reason, (3) multi-hop reasoning may be required, and (4) the gold answers of benchmarks must be continuously updated. To address these challenges, we introduce the PAT-Questions benchmark, which includes single and multi-hop temporal questions. The answers in PAT-Questions can be automatically refreshed by re-running SPARQL queries on a knowledge graph, if available. We evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs and a SOTA temporal reasoning model (TEMPREASON-T5) on PAT-Questions through direct prompting and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG). The results highlight the limitations of existing solutions in PATQA and motivate the need for new methods to improve PATQA reasoning capabilities.