Goader/recency-probe-2026

Recency Probe 2026

128 questions about facts that entered the record between January and August 2026, asked in Ukrainian and in English. A model trained before 2026 cannot answer them from what it knows; a model that has read 2026 Ukrainian news can.

Built from Goader/ukrainian-news-2026 — 429k articles from 23 Ukrainian national outlets. Every item is grounded in quotes from that corpus, which ship with the item.

What makes an item

Every candidate was put to a pre-2026 model (lapa-llm/lapa-12b-pt, based on gemma-3-12b-pt) in three framings, and kept only if the model failed all three. So the questions are not merely recent — they are demonstrably outside a 2025-cutoff model.

Two kinds:

• stale (46 items) — someone or something else was the correct answer before 2025, and that predecessor is deliberately one of the four options. Answering means overwriting a belief, not filling a blank.
• gap (82 items) — no such predecessor. Four same-type alternatives with no privileged wrong answer.

Domains: international 48, war 24, government 17, law 11, politics 6, society 6, culture 5, business 4, economy 4, sport 3. Answers are people (92), names (12), organisations (10), places (8), numbers (4) and dates (2).

Two formats

Cloze, scored by likelihood over four full-text continuations — the primary read. No letters, no instruction-following, so a base model and an instruct model can sit the same test and land in the same table.

Cloze:   З січня 2026 року посаду міністра оборони України обіймає ___
Options: Рустем Умєров · Степан Полторак · Олексій Резніков · Михайло Федоров

Open short answer, from question_* — meaningful after instruction tuning.

Baseline

lapa-llm/lapa-12b-pt, cloze ranking over the four options. Chance is 0.250.

slice	n	uk	en
all	128	0.195	0.195
gap	82	0.305	0.305
stale	46	0.000	0.000

The zero on stale is not luck running out. Ranking the Ukrainian options, the model picks the pre-2025 answer 67% of the time, another distractor 33%, and the correct answer never — systematically wrong rather than randomly wrong.

Fields

column	description
id	item id, pNNN
domain, answer_type	subject area; person / org / place / name / number / date
item_class	stale or gap, as above
question_uk, question_en	the question, for open short answer
cloze_uk, cloze_en	sentence prefix; cloze + " " + answer is grammatical
answer_uk, answer_en	the correct answer
aliases_uk, aliases_en	other acceptable surface forms
distractors_uk, distractors_en	three wrong options
choices_uk, choices_en	answer + distractors, shuffled and fixed
gold_uk, gold_en	index of the answer in choices_*
stale_uk	the pre-2025 answer where one exists, else null; always among the distractors
evidence	the quotes the item was verified against — outlet, month, text
n_articles, n_hosts	how many articles and outlets state the fact
in_train_mixin	whether this fact's articles appear in the train-mixin config of the news dataset

Every option set is checked mechanically: gold index correct, exactly three distractors, no duplicate choices, the answer absent from its own cloze, evidence spanning at least two outlets, no two items sharing an answer, and — because a Ukrainian cloze governs case and gender — no option set where the correct answer is the only grammatical fit.

Use with lm-evaluation-harness

Four tasks ship in lm-eval/:

lm_eval --model hf --model_args pretrained=<checkpoint> \
        --include_path lm-eval --tasks recency_probe

recency_probe_uk_cloze, recency_probe_en_cloze (likelihood ranking, the primary read), recency_probe_uk_open, recency_probe_en_open (generation), and recency_probe to run all four.

from datasets import load_dataset
ds = load_dataset("Goader/recency-probe-2026", split="test")

Limits

• 128 items — enough to compare checkpoints, small enough that a single fold's noise is visible. Report a confidence interval.
• gap items sit at 0.305 against a 0.250 floor. Their distractors are weaker than the stale half, where the pre-cutoff answer supplies one strong wrong option for free.
• Some facts predate 2026 — a commander appointed in 2024, a spokesman in post since 2008. They are here because the control model failed them in five framings across two languages, which is the criterion; they measure "learnable from Ukrainian news" rather than strictly "2026-only".
• The open tasks score by exact match and ignore the alias lists; the harness needs a custom filter to use them. The cloze tasks are unaffected.
• Items were written and cross-checked by language models over human-written quotes; the quotes are in the dataset, so any item can be audited against its own evidence.