On Evaluating LLMs’ Capabilities as Functional Approximators: A Bayesian Perspective

Recent works have successfully applied Large Language Models (LLMs) to function modelling tasks. However, the reasons behind this success remain unclear. In this work, we propose a new evaluation framework to comprehensively assess LLMs’ function modelling abilities. By adopting a Bayesian perspective of function modelling, we discover that LLMs are relatively weak in understanding patterns in raw data, but excel at utilizing prior knowledge about the domain to develop a strong understanding of the underlying function. Our findings offer new insights about the strengths and limitations of LLMs in the context of function modelling.