# Can I understand what I create? Self-Knowledge Evaluation of Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.06140 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.06140/

## Key facts

- Cited by 6 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 35 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 10 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [An Image is Worth 16x16 Words: Transformers for Image Recognition at Scale](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.11929/) (2020)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LoRA: Low-Rank Adaptation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.09685/) (2021)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Chain-of-Thought Prompting Elicits Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.11903/) (2022)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Segment Anything](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.02643/) (2023)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Visual Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08485/) (2023)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [Mistral 7B](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06825/) (2023)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [MiniGPT-4: Enhancing Vision-Language Understanding with Advanced Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.10592/) (2023)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [Code Llama: Open Foundation Models for Code](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.12950/) (2023)
- [MMMU: A Massive Multi-discipline Multimodal Understanding and Reasoning Benchmark for Expert AGI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.16502/) (2023)
- [MME: A Comprehensive Evaluation Benchmark for Multimodal Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.13394/) (2023)
- [Instruction-Following Evaluation for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.07911/) (2023)
- [DeepSeek-Coder: When the Large Language Model Meets Programming -- The Rise of Code Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.14196/) (2024)
- [PaLM 2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10403/) (2023)
- [MetaMath: Bootstrap Your Own Mathematical Questions for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.12284/) (2023)
- [AGIEval: A Human-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06364/) (2023)
- [LeanDojo: Theorem Proving with Retrieval-Augmented Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15626/) (2023)
- [Llemma: An Open Language Model For Mathematics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10631/) (2023)
- [Large Language Models are Better Reasoners with Self-Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09561/) (2022)
- [TrustLLM: Trustworthiness in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05561/) (2024)
- [Generating Images with Multimodal Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17216/) (2023)
- [ProofNet: Autoformalizing and Formally Proving Undergraduate-Level Mathematics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.12433/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 6 of 6)

- [Internal Consistency and Self-Feedback in Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.14507/) (2024)
- [First SFT, Second RL, Third UPT: Continual Improving Multi-Modal LLM Reasoning via Unsupervised Post-Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.22453/) (2025)
- [Quantifying and Mitigating Self-Preference Bias of LLM Judges](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.22891/) (2026)
- [AI Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.20084/) (2025)
- [StringLLM: Understanding the String Processing Capability of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.01208/) (2024)
- [Mirage of Mastery: Memorization Tricks LLMs into Artificially Inflated Self-Knowledge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18998/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in linguistic tasks, necessitating robust evaluation frameworks to understand their capabilities and limitations. Inspired by Feynman's principle of understanding through creation, we introduce a self-knowledge evaluation framework that is easy to implement, evaluating models on their ability to comprehend and respond to self-generated questions. Our findings, based on testing multiple models across diverse tasks, reveal significant gaps in the model's self-knowledge ability. Further analysis indicates these gaps may be due to misalignment with human attention mechanisms. Additionally, fine-tuning on self-generated math task may enhance the model's math performance, highlighting the potential of the framework for efficient and insightful model evaluation and may also contribute to the improvement of LLMs.