TIME: A Multi-level Benchmark for Temporal Reasoning of LLMs in Real-World Scenarios

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2505.12891v2
• Date: Sat, 19 Jul 2025 04:52:39 GMT
• Title: TIME: A Multi-level Benchmark for Temporal Reasoning of LLMs in Real-World Scenarios
• Authors: Shaohang Wei, Wei Li, Feifan Song, Wen Luo, Tianyi Zhuang, Haochen Tan, Zhijiang Guo, Houfeng Wang,
• Abstract summary: We propose a benchmark TIME, designed for temporal reasoning in real-world scenarios.<n> TIME consists of 38,522 QA pairs, covering 3 levels with 11 fine-grained sub-tasks.<n>We conduct extensive experiments on reasoning models and non-reasoning models.<n>We release TIME-Lite, a human-annotated subset to foster future research and standardized evaluation in temporal reasoning.
• Score: 26.668042778743835
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Temporal reasoning is pivotal for Large Language Models (LLMs) to comprehend the real world. However, existing works neglect the real-world challenges for temporal reasoning: (1) intensive temporal information, (2) fast-changing event dynamics, and (3) complex temporal dependencies in social interactions. To bridge this gap, we propose a multi-level benchmark TIME, designed for temporal reasoning in real-world scenarios. TIME consists of 38,522 QA pairs, covering 3 levels with 11 fine-grained sub-tasks. This benchmark encompasses 3 sub-datasets reflecting different real-world challenges: TIME-Wiki, TIME-News, and TIME-Dial. We conduct extensive experiments on reasoning models and non-reasoning models. And we conducted an in-depth analysis of temporal reasoning performance across diverse real-world scenarios and tasks, and summarized the impact of test-time scaling on temporal reasoning capabilities. Additionally, we release TIME-Lite, a human-annotated subset to foster future research and standardized evaluation in temporal reasoning. The code is available at https://github.com/sylvain-wei/TIME , and the dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/datasets/SylvainWei/TIME .

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