HellaSwag#

Overview#

HellaSwag is a benchmark for evaluating commonsense natural language inference, specifically testing a model’s ability to complete sentences describing everyday situations. The dataset uses adversarial filtering to create challenging distractors that are grammatically correct but semantically implausible.

Task Description#

  • Task Type: Multiple-Choice Sentence Completion

  • Input: Context describing an activity or situation

  • Output: Most plausible continuation from 4 choices (A, B, C, D)

  • Domain: Everyday activities and commonsense scenarios

Key Features#

  • 70,000+ questions testing grounded commonsense inference

  • Contexts derived from ActivityNet and WikiHow

  • Adversarially-filtered incorrect endings

  • Requires understanding of typical event sequences

  • Tests physical and social commonsense reasoning

Evaluation Notes#

  • Default configuration uses 0-shot evaluation

  • Evaluates on the validation split

  • Endings are preprocessed to clean formatting artifacts

  • Context combines ctx_a and ctx_b fields

  • Activity labels available in metadata for analysis

Properties#

Property

Value

Benchmark Name

hellaswag

Dataset ID

evalscope/hellaswag

Paper

N/A

Tags

Commonsense, Knowledge, MCQ

Metrics

acc

Default Shots

0-shot

Evaluation Split

validation

Data Statistics#

Metric

Value

Total Samples

10,042

Prompt Length (Mean)

767.6 chars

Prompt Length (Min/Max)

329 / 1655 chars

Sample Example#

Subset: default

{
  "input": [
    {
      "id": "18df47e2",
      "content": "Answer the following multiple choice question. The entire content of your response should be of the following format: 'ANSWER: [LETTER]' (without quotes) where [LETTER] is one of A,B,C,D.\n\nA man is sitting on a roof. He\n\nA) is using wrap to wrap a pair of skis.\nB) is ripping level tiles off.\nC) is holding a rubik's cube.\nD) starts pulling up roofing on a roof."
    }
  ],
  "choices": [
    "is using wrap to wrap a pair of skis.",
    "is ripping level tiles off.",
    "is holding a rubik's cube.",
    "starts pulling up roofing on a roof."
  ],
  "target": "D",
  "id": 0,
  "group_id": 0,
  "metadata": {
    "activity_label": "Roof shingle removal"
  }
}

Prompt Template#

Prompt Template:

Answer the following multiple choice question. The entire content of your response should be of the following format: 'ANSWER: [LETTER]' (without quotes) where [LETTER] is one of {letters}.

{question}

{choices}

Usage#

Using CLI#

evalscope eval \
    --model YOUR_MODEL \
    --api-url OPENAI_API_COMPAT_URL \
    --api-key EMPTY_TOKEN \
    --datasets hellaswag \
    --limit 10  # Remove this line for formal evaluation

Using Python#

from evalscope import run_task
from evalscope.config import TaskConfig

task_cfg = TaskConfig(
    model='YOUR_MODEL',
    api_url='OPENAI_API_COMPAT_URL',
    api_key='EMPTY_TOKEN',
    datasets=['hellaswag'],
    limit=10,  # Remove this line for formal evaluation
)

run_task(task_cfg=task_cfg)