Emotional Intelligence Benchmark for LLMs
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At this time we only accept submissions of open weight models that are available to everyone via HuggingFace.
To submit, get in touch by email or twitter with:
We will then verify the result on our end and add to the leaderboard. This project is self funded so please respect that we don't have unlimited compute!
EQ-Bench 3 is an LLM-judged benchmark, using Claude Sonnet 3.7, that tests emotional intelligence (EQ) through challenging role-plays and analysis tasks. It measures empathy, social skills, and insight in scenarios like relationship conflicts and workplace dilemmas.
Why? Standard EQ tests are too easy for LLMs, and existing benchmarks often miss nuanced social skills crucial for human-AI interaction. EQ-Bench 3 uses difficult, free-form role-plays to better discriminate between models.
How it works: Models respond in-character, explain their reasoning ("I'm thinking/feeling..."), and debrief. Responses are judged via a detailed rubric and pairwise comparisons (Elo rating) against other models. Elo scores are normalized (o3=1500, llama-3.2-1b=200).
Key Features: Focuses on active EQ, uses challenging/discriminative scenarios, provides both rubric scores (absolute, less discriminative) and Elo scores (relative, more discriminative), includes bias mitigation (length truncation for Elo, position bias control), and offers full transcripts. Costs ~$10-15 per full run.
Click "Long Version" below for full details on methodology, criteria, bias analysis, and limitations.
EQ-Bench 3 is a LLM-judged test judged by Claude Sonnet 3.7, evaluating active emotional intelligence abilities, understanding, insight, empathy, and interpersonal skills.
The test places the evaluated model into challenging role-plays involving messy relationship drama, parenting decisions, conflict mediation, and high stakes workplace situations. The model must:
The test is constructed to measure EQ abilities in isolation (i.e. minimal conflation with other abilities like reasoning or long context performance).
Few evals are targeting "soft skills" around emotional intelligence and social skills, despite these being extremely important aspects to human-AI interactions. Part of the reason is that subjective abilities are not straightforward to measure. EQ-Bench intends to provide an automated evaluation of these abilities, and a reliable vibe-check for these human-oriented traits and abilities.
EQβBench 3 aims to address all these points with a selection of challenging roleplay scenarios, in which the evaluated model interacts organically like it would with a user or in a real situation. The output format is structured, requiring the model to elucidate what it's thinking & feeling, what the other person is thinking and feeling, and then give its response. Within this structure, it's free to write what it likes. It's this freeβform nature of the assessment task that gives us a lot of signal to assess the model's understanding and abilities with every test item. Unlike a multipleβchoice EQ quiz, the roleplay format closely mirrors how the chatbot interacts with users in realβworld usage. We provide the full transcripts for each assessed model on the leaderboard, for visibility on how the model handled the roleplays & analysis tasks.
The Elo score represents whether a model "wins" at having higher EQ than its neighbours, according to the judge. To beat its neighbour, it has to score higher on several criteria (insight, social dexterity, etc), as evaluated by Sonnet 3.7. The full criteria assessed in the pairwise judgements are listed below.
The resulting Elo score represents a holistic view on the model's abilities: empathy, analytical understanding, social dexterity, deep insight, pragmatism, etc. A model has to be strong across all these dimensions to be at the top of the leaderboard.
user
messages set up the scenario, and subsequently inject conflict or misdirection, while the assistant
(the evaluated model) must reply in-character.
Every assistant reply starts with two introspection blocks:
"Iβm thinking & feeling" and "Theyβre thinking & feeling", exposing the modelβs reasoning and theory-of-mind understanding.The rubric score has a different distribution to the Elo score. The Elo score is more discriminative at the top-mid ability range (scores don't bunch up as much).
Note: Some rubric criteria do not count towards the final score; they are assessed to get visibility on style & tendencies. The rubric score is calculated from: Demonstrated Empathy, Pragmatic EI, Depth of Insight, Social Dexterity, Emotional Reasoning, Message Tailoring
We use a leaner set of criteria for pairwise evaluation, since we don't need to include all the "personality" probes from the rubric eval that are displayed on the leaderboard.
We plot scores (Elo & rubric) judged by Sonnet 3.7 against those judged by GPT-4.1 to inspect consistency and highlight potential judge-specific biases. Click to view full size.
Elo Bias Comparison
Rubric Bias Comparison
Running the rubric part of EQ-Bench on its own (no pairwise elo), we ran 10x iterations scoring gemini-2.5-flash-preview to check for per-iteration consistency. For this validation we used sonnet-3.7 as judge. The evaluated model uses temp=0.7, min_p=0.1 for its generations, so its outputs are significantly different with each iteration.
77.80Β 77.60Β 76.35Β 78.70Β 78.55Β 76.85Β 78.50Β 77.70Β 77.35Β 77.70
MeanΒ 77.71Β Β |Β Β StdΒ devΒ 0.75Β Β |Β Β RangeΒ 76.35β78.70
Interpretation: The degree of variance in scores is not large, but to mitigate variance we recommend running 5+ iterations to stabilise scores closer to the true mean.
To examine Elo repeatability, we ran several iterations of the full benchmark, evaluating gemini-2.5-flash-preview. The Elo matchups were against two anchor models, and also itself (the baseline). For this test, we used gemini-2.5-flash-preview as judge, for cost reasons. We expect sonnet 3.7, which is the judge used on the leaderboard, will have a tighter spread of values. If you have the budget for it, Elo scores & rankings can be stabilised further by simply running the benchmark with --iterations n
.
Your task is to critically examine two respondents role-playing a challenging scenario (from Respondents A0493 and A0488), and decide which displays each trait more strongly.
Compare the relative ability of each respondent on these criteria:
Notes on the scenario to assist judging:
{scenario_notes}
Judging instructions:
"A0391++"
means A0391 is somewhat stronger, while "A0986+++++"
means A0986 is overwhelmingly stronger.Several adversarial prompting strategies were attempted, to probe whether the judge can be trivially exploited for higher scores. Note that the pairwise (Elo) evaluation pipeline truncates outputs to a standardised length before judging, but the rubric evaluation does not.
Each of these probes was repeated for 10 iterations, with the average of these results shown. We use gemini-2.5-flash as judge, to keep costs manageable.
Test model: google/gemini-2.5-flash-preview Β |Β
Judge: google/gemini-2.5-flash-preview
Prompt tweakΒ (short label) | RubricΒ ΞΒ % | EloΒ ΞΒ % |
---|---|---|
Be extremely warmΒ &Β validating | β0.25Β % | +0.76Β % |
Be challenging where appropriate | β0.06Β % | β0.17Β % |
Be strongly challenging or warmly validating as appropriate | β0.52Β % | β1.32Β % |
Be strongly challenging | β1.08Β % | β2.04Β % |
Respond concisely (noΒ bloat) | β0.60Β % | β0.41Β % |
Respond in 100Β words per section | β3.02Β % | β4.69Β % |
Write extremely thoroughΒ &Β lengthy responses | β0.16Β % | -0.49Β % |
We selected the most promising adversarial probe for inflating scores, and applied it to a "worst case" model. That being deepseek r1, whose baseline scores are relatively low on warmth & validation, so is most likely to benefit from a system prompt instructing it to express these traits strongly. We repeat this test 5x, using sonnet-3.7 as judge to align with leaderboard conditions:
Test model: deepseek/deepseek-r1 Β |Β Judge: anthropic/claude-3.7-sonnet
Prompt tweakΒ (short label) | RubricΒ ΞΒ % | EloΒ ΞΒ % |
---|---|---|
Be extremely warmΒ &Β validating | +1.30Β % | +2.80Β % |
Interpretation: The judge appears to prefer r1's outputs when it's been instructed to be "extremely warm & validating" in its responses to the other roleplay participant. This might represent a bias with the judge, or a genuine improvement in its responses (since baseline r1 scored low on warmth & validation). In these brief tests, we intentionally tried to engineer worst cases for exploiting the eval to trivially inflate scores. Prompt perturbations of this sort are known to produce large swings in other evals (in the order of 5+%). The highest uplift we saw (1.3% for rubric and 2.8% for elo) is significant, but not indicative of a strongly exploitable vector. This suggests the eval is robust to exploitation at least in these directions we tested.
Note that we only tested potential exploits by injecting instructions into the system prompt. Further exploration is needed to examine whether the eval is exploitable through fine tuning.
** A more real-world case to examine is chatgpt-4o-latest-2025-04-25, the notorious "glazing" update. It scores higher on compliance
, warmth
& validating
, and much lower on challenging
compared to its neighbours. But its Elo score is actually *lower* than chatgpt-4o-latest-2025-03-27. This indicates that the judge may not in fact have a universal preference for overly validating outputs.
EQβBench 3 is a subjective evaluation judged by a LLM (Sonnet 3.7). As such, the results should be considered roughly indicative but not absolute truth. The sample transcripts are provided so you can make your own judgements. Several test items target typical LLM failure modes, like over-cautiousness from safety training. This may cause some models to be penalised more than others. The Elo score isn't representing any one aspect of EQ in isolation. Rather, it's a holistic representation of active social abilities, insight, empathy and analytical understanding.
Emotional Intelligence or EQ doesn't have any ground truth or agreed upon definitions in the literature or colloquially. However there is a rich breadth of ideas about what constitutes emotional intelligence, which were drawn from when formulating test items. It should be noted that this benchmark doesn't represent any one theory or formulation of EQ.
The test set is relatively small (45 items) and eschews *comprehensiveness* for *discriminative power*. We took the approach of authoring a small number of highly challenging test items, because traditional EQ test questions are far too easy for modern LLMs and so not discriminative. We compensate for the small test set size by having each assessment be multi-turn, producing a lot of assessable signal in the form of per-response internal thoughts and a self-debrief. We also use a modification of the Trueskill Elo solver that allows it to incorporate win margins, providing better discriminative power per test item.
EQ-Bench is a benchmark for language models designed to assess emotional intelligence.
Why emotional intelligence? One reason is that it represents a subset of abilities that are important for the user experience, and which isn't explicitly tested by other benchmarks. Another reason is that it's not trivial to improve scores by fine tuning for the benchmark, which makes it harder to "game" the leaderboard.
EQ-Bench is a little different from traditional psychometric tests. It uses a specific question format, in which the subject has to read a dialogue then rate the intensity of possible emotional responses of one of the characters. Every question is interpretative and assesses the ability to predict the magnitude of the 4 presented emotions. The test is graded without the need for a judge (so there is no length bias). It's cheap to run (only 171 questions), and produces results that correlate strongly with human preference (Arena Elo) and multi-domain benchmarks like MMLU.
You can run the benchmark on your own models or validate the leaderboard scores using the code in the github repo above.
If you would like to see a model on the leaderboard, get in touch and suggest it!
LLM Benchmarks are chasing a moving target and fast running out of headroom. They are struggling to effectively separate SOTA models from leaderboard optimisers. Can we salvage these old dinosaurs for scrap and make a better benchmark?
MAGI-Hard is a recently added metric to the leaderboard. It is a custom subset of MMLU and AGIEval, selected to have strong discriminatory power between top ability models.
Read more here.
You can use the MAGI test sets with this fork of EleutherAI lm-evaluation-harness.
A new version of the creative writing benchmark has dropped! In this update:
How the benchmark works:
Rubric vs Elo Scores
We score the model two different ways: First, with the model's output presented to the judge on its own, which is then scored to a rubric on several criteria. You can see the analysis & scores per item for the rubric evaluation in the sample outputs. The aggregate score on all the items is what is shown on the leaderboard as "Rubric score".
Second, we score the model by matching it up against other models on the leaderboard in pairwise matchups (of the same writing prompt). The judge picks which of the outputs is better on several criteria. These pairwise matchup results are then used to compute the Elo score.
Why do these scores disagree? Pairwise matchups allow the judge to be more discriminative than scoring a single item in isolation. When it's directly comparing one item to another, it's easier to spot small differences. The scores may also differ because we use different criteria in the judging prompts between rubris & pairwise. The judge will also be subject to different biases depending on the evaluation method.
Which one is right? Well, both and neither. Both approaches have pros & cons: rubric evals are less subject to systematic biases, but less discriminative.
Score Normalisation
The Elo solver shifts all the scores around whenever a new model is added. To counter this, on the leaderboard we anchor the scores such that DeepSeek-R1 has a score of 1500 and ministral-3b has a score of 200. You may see intermediate scores shift around a bit; this is just a quirk of relative rating systems.
Benchmark Philosophy:
Judging creative writing reliably -- and *in line with human preferences* -- is hard. The fundamental limitation of any creative writing evaluation is the judge's ability to discern good writing from bad. On top of this, there are a host of biases that LLM judges can exhibit.
The previous version of the creative writing eval (v2) was saturating, meaning the judge could no longer tell apart models around the top ability range. To remedy this in v3, every aspect of the test is tuned to make this task easier for the judge.
We now use pairwise comparisons and an Elo ranking system, as it offers better discriminative power than a scoring rubric alone.
The prompts were chosen through a process of elimination to be challenging for weaker models and therefore highly discriminative. It's a bit counter-intuitive, but the purpose of the evaluation is not to help models write their best. Instead, we are deliberately exposing weaknesses, creating a steeper gradient for the judge to evaluate on.
The prompt requirements include humour, romance, spatial awareness, unusual first-person perspectives. Things language models typically struggle to represent to the level of human writers. So, expect some clangers in the outputs!
Cost:
The hybrid rubric + Glicko scoring system that we've implemented is relatively economical for an Elo framework. But scoring a model still costs around $10 in API fees. (Side note: if you'd like to sponsor these leaderboards, get in touch.)
Mitigating Bias:
Since moving to pairwise comparisons, we have to contend with new biases that this method is notorious for. Here are some of the biases that we have attempted to control for:
Biases we don't control for:
The Pairwise Judging Prompt:
Compare the relative ability of each writer on these criteria:
Judging notes:
The response will use a + / ++ / +++ / ++++ / +++++ format to denote the stronger response and relative ability difference for each criteria.
Limitations of the benchmark:
The scores and rankings should only ever be interpreted as a rough guide of writing ability. Evaluating creative writing is highly subjective and tastes differ. It's good to be skeptical of benchmark numbers by default; the best way to judge is to use the model yourself or read the sample outputs.
What the benchmark is not:
Source Code:
Source code for running the benchmark and replicating the leaderboard results is available here.
This benchmark uses a LLM judge (Claude 3.5 Sonnet) to assess the creative writing abilities of the test models on a series of writing prompts.
You can reproduce these results or run the benchmark on your own models with the EQ-Bench repo on Github.
Update 2025-02-25: New metric -- Vocab Complexity
It's become apparent that the judge in this eval is easily impressed by vocab flexing. Some of the models tested use an inordinate amount of complex multisyllabic vocabulary, and it artificially inflates their score. As such we've introduced a new column for vocab complexity ("Vocab"), using a calculation of the proportion of words having 3+ syllables.
The "Vocab control" slider penalises overly complex vocab usage. It may seem counter-intuitive to penalise complex vocab, but in our experience, vocab-maxxing harms writing quality. Since this is quite a subjective aspect to the evaluation, we let the user set the penalty amount.
GPT-Slop
The "Slop" metric measures words that are typically over-used by LLMs (also known as GPT-isms). Higher values == more slop. It calculates a value representing how many words in the test model's output match words that are over-represented in typical language model writing. We compute the list of "gpt slop" words by counting the frequency of words in a large dataset of generated stories (Link to dataset).
Some additional phrases have been added to the slop list as compiled from similar lists around the internet.
The full list, as well as the code to generate the over-represented words, can be found here: https://github.com/sam-paech/antislop-sampler.
If you're interested in reducing gpt-isms, you can try the anti-slop sampler found in this repo. It downregulates the probability of the provided phrase list as the model inferences.
We've released v2 of the creative writing benchmark & leaderboard. The old version was starting to saturate (scores bunching at the top), so we removed some of the less discriminative prompts, switched judge models, and made some other improvements besides.
Version 2 Changes
There has been a distinct lack of automated benchmarks for creative writing because, put simply, it's hard to assess writing quality without humans in the loop. Asking a language model, "How good is this writing (0-10)" elicits poor results. Even if we had a good LLM judge, it's not immediately obvious how to formalise the assessment of creative writing objectively.
The release of Claude 3, in particular the flagship Opus model, has solved half of this equation: it's able to give meaningful & nuanced analysis of creative writing output, and it can tell the difference between a wide range of ability levels.
To solve the other half of the equation, we've come up with an assessment format that works to the strengths of LLM judges and avoids their weaknesses. LLM judges are typically bad at scoring nebulous metrics like "How well written is this piece?" They also find it hard to give consistent scores on an objective rating system if they don't have some exemplar or baseline reference to compare to.
Our test includes:
This approach of breaking down the assessment task into a granular set of criteria and comparing to an exemplar has brought creative writing assessment into the purview of LLM judges. Our test is discriminative amongst a wide range of writing ability levels.
* A note on biases *
LLM judges have biases. LLM-as-a-judge benchmarks such as Alpaca-Eval can exhibit a strong length bias where the judge, (in Alpaca-Eval's case GPT-4), prefers longer outputs. Their approach involves presenting the output from two models to the judge, and the judge says which it thinks is better.
We attempt to mitigate the length bias by: A. assessing by 27 narrow criteria, and B. explicitly instructing the judge not to be biased by length (this seems to work for MT-Bench).
As of version 2, we now include length control slider which scales the score up or down depending on whether the average output length for a given model is above or below the average for all models. This is an attempt to control the bias where the judge model tends to favour longer outputs. With the slider at 0%, no length scaling is applied. With the slider at 100%, the scores are scaled by up to 10%. This length control implementation is somewhat arbitrary; it's not really possible to precisely control for this bias, as we can't meaningfully hold the writing quality equal while varying the length. It does seem likely/evident that some degree of length bias is present, and has set the default LC parameters according to our rough intuitive guess (science!).
It's possible / likely that this & other biases might still be a factor in scoring (e.g. Claude might prefer its own and other anthropic models). So bear this in mind when interpreting the results.
We include the outputs that the model generated for each prompt so you can judge for yourself.
Alternative Judge Models
Yes, you can use other judge models than Claude Opus (although the results won't be directly comparable). Currently the benchmark pipeline supports Anthropic, OpenAI and Mistral models via their APIs. Soon we will support local models as judges.
* A note on variance *
This benchmark has a relatively small number of test questions (19). We specify generation temperature = 0.7 so each run is different. This means there is significant variation of scores between iterations (avg range: 3.35, std dev: 1.41). To reduce variance we recommend using 3 iterations or more. The leaderboard scores are averaged over 3 iterations.
It costs around $3.00 to bench a model over 3 iterations using Claude 3 Opus at current rates.
If you would like your model included on the creative writing leaderboard, please consider contributing to my compute costs, and get in touch!
Judgemark V2 is a major update to our original βjudgeβ benchmark for creative-writing evaluation. The benchmark measures how well a language model can numerically grade a diverse set of short fiction outputs, using a detailed rubric of positive and negative criteria. It goes beyond simpler pairwise preference tests by requiring the judge to follow complex instructions, parse each story, and produce scores for up to 36 different literary qualities.
Key improvements over V1 include:
Repeatability Results
We tested Llama-3.1-70B-instruct 20 times to test the repeatability of the final Judgemark score (tests were run at temp=0.5, top_k=3).
llama-3.3-70b_judgemark_scores = [
55.7, 54.4, 55.4, 56.7, 55.0, 56.3, 57.0, 54.5, 55.6, 56.1,
54.9, 57.5, 55.0, 53.8, 54.7, 56.2, 55.7, 54.6, 55.4, 56.6, 54.0
]
Mean Score: 55.481
Standard Deviation: 1.004
Range (Max - Min): 3.67
Coefficient of Variation: 0.0181
The Judging Task: Each test item is a short creative piece generated by one of 17 βwriter modelsβ. These models' writing abilities are an even spread from weak to strong. The judge model receives a lengthy prompt that includes (a) the writing prompt itself, (b) the test modelβs story, and (c) an extensive list of scoring instructions (for example, βNuanced Characters: 0β10,β βOverwrought: 0β10β, etc.). The judge must then output numeric scores for each criterion. We parse those scores and aggregate them into a single aggregated_score_raw for each piece. Some criteria like βWeak Dialogueβ are marked lower is better in the judging prompt which adds additional complexity to the task.
Final Judgemark Score: After scoring all stories from multiple writers, we track how the judgeβs ratings compare to known references and how well they separate the better texts from weaker ones. We also measure how consistently the judgeβs rankings repeat if we prompt it again, and compute correlation with human preference rankings (per Chatbot Arena Elo scores). The final Judgemark formula is a weighted sum of these computed metrics. See the formula at the bottom of the leaderboard page here.
Interpreting the Leaderboard: In the table, βScore (Calibrated)β is typically higher if a judge effectively uses the full range of scores (once normalized), strongly differentiates strong vs. weak writing, and correlates with human preferences. βScore (Raw)β shows how the judge performed before any normalization. βStabilityβ indicates how consistent the judgeβs assigned rankings remain across repeated trials. βSeparabilityβ highlights the judgeβs ability to keep higher- and lower-quality outputs well apart.
This is a particularly difficult task for LLMs, as it involves nuanced literary critique and instructs models to use a multi-dimensional numeric scaleβan area where many generative models still struggle.
Source code for running Judgemark v2 can be found here: https://github.com/EQ-bench/Judgemark-v2.
A humour analysis benchmark.
BuzzBench dataset on Huggingface
Do you enjoy seeing the jokes from your favourite shows dissected with a blunt machete? Well, you found the right benchmark.
The task of explaining traditionally constructed jokes is actually pretty straightforward for modern LLMs. So we made things more difficult:
The responses from SOTA models typically miss a lot of the humour, predict the funniness badly, fabricate and over-analyse. That's good! It's meant to be a hard test. The task encodes some deep complexities including theory of mind understanding and requires an intricate understanding of how jokes work. The show is also very British and exists in a dated cultural context, increasing the interpretation challenge.
"Humour is so subjective -- so how can you even make a benchmark around that?"
This benchmark is as much about predicting human responses to jokes as it is about joke deconstruction. The questions are explicitly framed around analysing the jokes from the perspective of the show's audience, and from the perspective of a comedy writer. The human authored gold answers ground the judge's answers in a real human's sense of humour. This shifts the task from being about subjective taste to being about modeling human response to jokes.
The intention for the task design is for there to be significant (nontrivial) headroom on the benchmark as language models get better at getting inside our heads.
The Judge: Claude 3.5 Sonnet. We picked Sonnet 3.5 to act as the judge partly because it scores highest on the Judgemark leaderboard, and partly because it seems least biased to favour longwinded, over-analysed, over-reaching responses. Which is a common failure mode in respondent answers, and something other judges are more easily led astray by.
* A note on judge self-bias:
We can expect there could be some degree of self-bias with the judge preferring its own outputs, although this is difficult to quantify and disentangle from other sources of bias. We should remain aware that LLM judge benchmarks are not perfect. The upside of a LLM judge using a scoring rubric is that we get nice interpretable results in the form of the judge's analysis and scores. So we have good visibility on whether the judge is doing its job, and can decide for ourselves whether the respondent models are indeed getting the humour, or just talking shite.
Models are evaluated using openrouter with temp=0.7. Several (typically 5-10) iterations are performed per model to establish confidence intervals and mitigate variance.
BuzzBench source code will be released soon.
Never Mind The Buzzcocks is a TV series developed by the BBC. Our usage of the work in BuzzBench is non-commercial educational & research, using only a small excerpt of the show's transcript which falls under fair use or "fair dealing" in UK copyright law.
DiploBench is an experimental framework for evaluating LLM performance in strategic negotiation using the board game Diplomacy.
What is DiploBench?
In DiploBench, the test model plays as Austria-Hungary, a challenging starting position that requires skillful negotiation and strategic planning. The model must communicate with other AI players, form alliances, detect deception, and make tactical decisions to survive and win the game.
Key Features:
Game Structure:
Games run for up to 50 turns with 4-round negotiation phases before each movement. All competing models (other than the test model) are powered by the same baseline LLM. Games end in win, loss, or stalemate conditions according to standard Diplomacy rules.
This benchmark uniquely tests LLMs on several dimensions that are difficult to evaluate in other benchmarks: long-term strategic planning, multi-agent negotiation, theory of mind, and deception detection.
Note: Due to the high variance between game runs, DiploBench is currently an experimental framework rather than a formal benchmark. Results should be interpreted accordingly.
For more details and source code, see the DiploBench GitHub repository.
@misc{paech2023eqbench,
title={EQ-Bench: An Emotional Intelligence Benchmark for Large Language Models},
author={Samuel J. Paech},
year={2023},
eprint={2312.06281},
archivePrefix={arXiv},
primaryClass={cs.CL}
}
MAGI draws from the MMLU and AGIEval tests. Click to show citations