Is Your LLM Outdated? A Deep Look at Temporal Generalization
Chenghao Zhu, Nuo Chen, Yufei Gao, Yunyi Zhang, Prayag Tiwari, Benyou Wang
Abstract
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has led to the development of benchmarks that consider temporal dynamics, however, there remains a gap in understanding how well these models can generalize across temporal contexts due to the inherent dynamic nature of language and information. This paper introduces the concept of temporal generalization in LLMs, including bias in past and future generalizations. Then we introduce FreshBench, a new evaluation framework that employs fresh text and event prediction for assessing LLMs’ temporal adaptability, ensuring the evaluation process free from data leakage and subjective bias. The experiment shows significant temporal biases and a decline in performance over time.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{chenghaozhu-etal-2025-llm,
title = "Is Your {LLM} Outdated? A Deep Look at Temporal Generalization",
author = "Zhu, Chenghao and
Chen, Nuo and
Gao, Yufei and
Zhang, Yunyi and
Tiwari, Prayag and
Wang, Benyou",
editor = "Chiruzzo, Luis and
Ritter, Alan and
Wang, Lu",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = apr,
year = "2025",
address = "Albuquerque, New Mexico",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.naacl-long.381/",
pages = "7433--7457",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-189-6"
}