# DARG: Dynamic Evaluation of Large Language Models via Adaptive Reasoning Graph

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.17271 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17271/

## Key facts

- Cited by 26 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning.
- Builds on 60 of its 120 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jun 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM reasoning / [Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/lr/reasoning-benchmarks-and-evaluation/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 60)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [DeepSeekMath: Pushing the Limits of Mathematical Reasoning in Open Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.03300/) (2024)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [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)
- [Sparks of Artificial General Intelligence: Early experiments with GPT-4](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.12712/) (2023)
- [Voyager: An Open-Ended Embodied Agent with Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.16291/) (2023)
- [Phi-3 Technical Report: A Highly Capable Language Model Locally on Your Phone](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14219/) (2024)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09261/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05232/) (2023)
- [Least-to-Most Prompting Enables Complex Reasoning in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.10625/) (2022)
- [WizardLM: Empowering large pre-trained language models to follow complex instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.12244/) (2023)
- [Inner Monologue: Embodied Reasoning through Planning with Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.05608/) (2022)
- [A General Language Assistant as a Laboratory for Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.00861/) (2021)
- [Enhancing Chat Language Models by Scaling High-quality Instructional Conversations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14233/) (2023)
- [Discovering Language Model Behaviors with Model-Written Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09251/) (2022)
- [Quantifying Memorization Across Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2202.07646/) (2022)
- [A Survey on In-context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00234/) (2022)
- [AGIEval: A Human-Centric Benchmark for Evaluating Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.06364/) (2023)
- [Self-Rewarding Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.10020/) (2024)
- [WizardMath: Empowering Mathematical Reasoning for Large Language Models via Reinforced Evol-Instruct](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.09583/) (2023)
- [Sleeper Agents: Training Deceptive LLMs that Persist Through Safety Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.05566/) (2024)
- [RewardBench: Evaluating Reward Models for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.13787/) (2024)
- [MetaICL: Learning to Learn In Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.15943/) (2021)
- [ToolAlpaca: Generalized Tool Learning for Language Models with 3000 Simulated Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05301/) (2023)
- [Llemma: An Open Language Model For Mathematics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.10631/) (2023)
- [Detecting Pretraining Data from Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16789/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 26 of 26)

- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation with Graphs (GraphRAG)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.00309/) (2024)
- [Recent Advances in Large Langauge Model Benchmarks against Data Contamination: From Static to Dynamic Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.17521/) (2025)
- [A Survey on Data Contamination for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14425/) (2025)
- [VipAct: Visual-Perception Enhancement via Specialized VLM Agent Collaboration and Tool-use](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.16400/) (2024)
- [Plan-over-Graph: Towards Parallelable LLM Agent Schedule](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14563/) (2025)
- [NetArena: Dynamic Benchmarks for AI Agents in Network Automation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.03231/) (2025)
- [DynaCode: A Dynamic Complexity-Aware Code Benchmark for Evaluating Large Language Models in Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.10452/) (2025)
- [CapBencher: Give Your LLM Benchmark a Built-in Alarm for Test-Set Overfitting](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.18102/) (2025)
- [How Much Do Large Language Model Cheat on Evaluation? Benchmarking Overestimation under the One-Time-Pad-Based Framework](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19219/) (2025)
- [Local Success Does Not Compose: Benchmarking Large Language Models for Compositional Formal Verification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.23061/) (2025)
- [Dynamic-KGQA: A Scalable Framework for Generating Adaptive Question Answering Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.05049/) (2025)
- [Executable Functional Abstractions: Inferring Generative Programs for Advanced Math Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09763/) (2025)
- [Automated Capability Evaluation of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17228/) (2025)
- [SegSub: Evaluating Robustness to Knowledge Conflicts and Hallucinations in Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.14908/) (2025)
- [Evaluating from Benign to Dynamic Adversarial: A Squid Game for Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.10691/) (2025)
- [Tracr-Injection: Distilling Algorithms into Pre-trained Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.10719/) (2025)
- [Investigating Advanced Reasoning of Large Language Models via Black-Box Environment Interaction](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.19035/) (2025)
- [Evaluating Implicit Regulatory Compliance in LLM Tool Invocation via Logic-Guided Synthesis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.08196/) (2026)
- [iAgentBench: Benchmarking Sensemaking Capabilities of Information-Seeking Agents on High-Traffic Topics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.04656/) (2026)
- [The Unlearning Mirage: A Dynamic Framework for Evaluating LLM Unlearning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.11266/) (2026)
- [Financial Instruction Following Evaluation (FIFE)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.08965/) (2025)
- [VeRA: Renewing Reasoning Benchmarks with Executable Specifications](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.13217/) (2026)
- [Silicon Bureaucracy and AI Test-Oriented Education: Contamination Sensitivity and Score Confidence in LLM Benchmarks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.21636/) (2026)
- [Automatically Generating Hard Math Problems from Hypothesis-Driven Error Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.04386/) (2026)
- [When Verification Fails: How Compositionally Infeasible Claims Escape Rejection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.10990/) (2026)
- [HARDEN: Constrained Evolutionary Search for Harder, Answer-Preserving Evaluation Cases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.30571/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The current paradigm of evaluating Large Language Models (LLMs) through static benchmarks comes with significant limitations, such as vulnerability to data contamination and a lack of adaptability to the evolving capabilities of LLMs. Therefore, evaluation methods that can adapt and generate evaluation data with controlled complexity are urgently needed. In this work, we introduce Dynamic Evaluation of LLMs via Adaptive Reasoning Graph Evolvement (DARG) to dynamically extend current benchmarks with controlled complexity and diversity. Specifically, we first extract the reasoning graphs of data points in current benchmarks and then perturb the reasoning graphs to generate novel testing data. Such newly generated test samples can have different levels of complexity while maintaining linguistic diversity similar to the original benchmarks. We further use a code-augmented LLM to ensure the label correctness of newly generated data. We apply our DARG framework to diverse reasoning tasks in four domains with 15 state-of-the-art LLMs. Experimental results show that almost all LLMs experience a performance decrease with increased complexity and certain LLMs exhibit significant drops. Additionally, we find that LLMs exhibit more biases when being evaluated via the data generated by DARG with higher complexity levels. These observations provide useful insights into how to dynamically and adaptively evaluate LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/SALT-NLP/DARG.
