LLMs or Naive Bayes? Old Gems or New Ways
Quick summary
arXiv:2609.13185v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) prompt a recurring question in research computing: should classical methods like Naive Bayes (NB) be retired? We benchmark Complement Naive Bayes against zero-shot and few-shot LLMs spanning four model families and a 37x range in scale (27B to a 1T-parameter mixture-of-experts) across text classification tasks. LLMs dominate only in zero-data regimes (98.0% vs 88.2% on Amazon Polarity sentiment), and even that win is contamination-prone: on a low-contamination sentiment task NB beats the zero-shot LLM (81.7% vs 73.0
Key takeaways
- arXiv:2609.13185v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) prompt a recurring question in research computing: should classical methods like Naive Bayes (NB) be retired?
- We benchmark Complement Naive Bayes against zero-shot and few-shot LLMs spanning four model families and a 37x range in scale (27B to a 1T-parameter mixture-of-experts) across text classification tasks.
- LLMs dominate only in zero-data regimes (98.0% vs 88.2% on Amazon Polarity sentiment), and even that win is contamination-prone: on a low-contamination sentiment task NB beats the zero-shot LLM (81.7% vs 73.0
Why it matters
“LLMs or Naive Bayes? Old Gems or New Ways” highlights the need for repeatable measurement rather than a single impressive demonstration. Independent validation across datasets and clearly stated limitations determine whether a result can guide product decisions.
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