The Self-Execution Benchmark: Measuring LLMs' Attempts to Overcome Their Lack of Self-Execution

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12277v1
• Date: Sun, 17 Aug 2025 07:57:58 GMT
• Title: The Self-Execution Benchmark: Measuring LLMs' Attempts to Overcome Their Lack of Self-Execution
• Authors: Elon Ezra, Ariel Weizman, Amos Azaria,
• Abstract summary: Large language models (LLMs) are commonly evaluated on tasks that test their knowledge or reasoning abilities.<n>We introduce the Self-Execution Benchmark, which measures a model's ability to anticipate properties of its output.<n>Our experiments show that models generally perform poorly on this benchmark, and that increased model size or capability does not consistently lead to better performance.
• Score: 13.62116438805314
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are commonly evaluated on tasks that test their knowledge or reasoning abilities. In this paper, we explore a different type of evaluation: whether an LLM can predict aspects of its own responses. Since LLMs lack the ability to execute themselves, we introduce the Self-Execution Benchmark, which measures a model's ability to anticipate properties of its output, such as whether a question will be difficult for it, whether it will refuse to answer, or what kinds of associations it is likely to produce. Our experiments show that models generally perform poorly on this benchmark, and that increased model size or capability does not consistently lead to better performance. These results suggest a fundamental limitation in how LLMs represent and reason about their own behavior.

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