# Disce aut Deficere: Evaluating LLMs Proficiency on the INVALSI Italian Benchmark

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.17535 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17535/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 53 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 25 Jun 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [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)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [SQuAD: 100,000+ Questions for Machine Comprehension of Text](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1606.05250/) (2016)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [Finetuned Language Models Are Zero-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.01652/) (2021)
- [Gemini 1.5: Unlocking multimodal understanding across millions of tokens of context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.05530/) (2024)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2206.04615/) (2022)
- [BLOOM: A 176B-Parameter Open-Access Multilingual Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.05100/) (2022)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Evaluation of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03109/) (2023)
- [Towards Reasoning in Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10403/) (2022)
- [Quality at a Glance: An Audit of Web-Crawled Multilingual Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.12028/) (2021)
- [XTREME-R: Towards More Challenging and Nuanced Multilingual Evaluation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.07412/) (2021)
- [XLM-V: Overcoming the Vocabulary Bottleneck in Multilingual Masked Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.10472/) (2023)
- [Eliciting the Translation Ability of Large Language Models via Multilingual Finetuning with Translation Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.15083/) (2023)
- [Improving Multilingual Models with Language-Clustered Vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.12777/) (2020)
- [LLaMAntino: LLaMA 2 Models for Effective Text Generation in Italian Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.09993/) (2023)
- [On the Multilingual Capabilities of Very Large-Scale English Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.13349/) (2021)
- [Advanced Natural-based interaction for the ITAlian language: LLaMAntino-3-ANITA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.07101/) (2024)
- [GePpeTto Carves Italian into a Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.14253/) (2020)
- [Fauno: The Italian Large Language Model that will leave you senza parole!](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14457/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [Survey of Cultural Awareness in Language Models: Text and Beyond](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.00860/) (2024)
- [Non Verbis, Sed Rebus: Large Language Models are Weak Solvers of Italian Rebuses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.00584/) (2024)
- [Testing Low-Resource Language Support in LLMs Using Language Proficiency Exams: the Case of Luxembourgish](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.01667/) (2025)
- [La Leaderboard: A Large Language Model Leaderboard for Spanish Varieties and Languages of Spain and Latin America](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.00999/) (2025)
- [An Empirical Investigation of Gender Stereotype Representation in Large Language Models: The Italian Case](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.19156/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have significantly enhanced their ability to generate and manipulate human language, highlighting their potential across various applications. Evaluating LLMs in languages other than English is crucial for ensuring their linguistic versatility, cultural relevance, and applicability in diverse global contexts, thus broadening their usability and effectiveness. We tackle this challenge by introducing a structured benchmark using the INVALSI tests, a set of well-established assessments designed to measure educational competencies across Italy. Our study makes three primary contributions: Firstly, we adapt the INVALSI benchmark for automated LLM evaluation, which involves rigorous adaptation of the test format to suit automated processing while retaining the essence of the original tests. Secondly, we provide a detailed assessment of current LLMs, offering a crucial reference point for the academic community. Finally, we visually compare the performance of these models against human results. Additionally, researchers are invited to submit their models for ongoing evaluation, ensuring the benchmark remains a current and valuable resource.