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MMLU

MMLU evaluates broad text-only knowledge recall and problem solving across the sampled school, university, and professional domains.

MMLU ICLR 2021 paper release

Permanent entry
Task and data
MMLU aggregates four-choice questions across 57 academic and professional subjects, with development, validation, and held-out test examples.
Primary metric
The paper reports classification accuracy averaged across examples and tasks; higher is better within the same release and prompting protocol.
What it measures
broad text-only knowledge recall and problem solving across the sampled school, university, and professional domains.
Comparison rules
Compare only results using the same 57-task release and matching shot/scoring protocol. Later MMLU variants and provider-reported aggregates may use different prompts.
Access and licensing
The Compendium links to the paper and does not reproduce questions. Underlying question sources can retain separate rights and terms.
Selected published third-party results for MMLU ICLR 2021 paper release. Draconitic did not run these evaluations.
Published subjectScoreMetricSplit and evaluation settingSource record
GPT-3 175B (paper label: X-Large)mmlu-2021:test:57-task:few-shot 43.9%higher, percent average classification accuracyhistorical paper baseline 57-task test aggregateFew-shot prompting; the paper evaluates the 175B GPT-3 variant across all tasks.This is the original paper baseline, not a current GPT-family result. MMLU authorsPublished 2021-01-12, reviewed 2026-07-13original-paper, published-third-party
Unspecialized Amazon Mechanical Turk participantsmmlu-2021:human:unspecialized 34.5%higher, percent average classification accuracyhistorical human baseline human comparison over the benchmarkHuman baseline described by the paper; participant sampling detail is limited in the result summary.A crowd-worker baseline is not an estimate of expert performance. MMLU authorsPublished 2021-01-12, reviewed 2026-07-13human-baseline, published-third-party
Estimated expert-level human performancemmlu-2021:human:expert-estimate 89.8%higher, percent estimated average accuracyhistorical estimate 57-subject aggregate estimatePaper authors combine available 95th-percentile exam performance with estimates where equivalent data are unavailable.This is an author estimate, not one controlled participant run across every MMLU subject. MMLU authorsPublished 2021-01-12, reviewed 2026-07-13human-baseline, published-third-party

Claims and evidence

Claim ledger, 2