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Long-context Language Models Fail in Basic Retrieval Tasks Without Sufficient Reasoning Steps

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arxiv 2410.04422 v9 pith:FWKXAADE submitted 2024-10-06 cs.CL

classification cs.CL
keywords long-contexttasksreasoningtheybasicfaillanguagemodels
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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Long-context language models (LCLMs), characterized by their extensive context window, are becoming popular. However, despite the fact that they are nearly perfect at standard long-context retrieval tasks, our evaluations demonstrate they fail in some basic cases. Later, we find they can be well addressed with a sufficient number of reasoning steps, guided by specific CoT prompts. This result emphasizes the potential necessity of solving specific long-context tasks using long-CoT methods, while previous long-context benchmarks always ignore the necessity of long reasoning for long-context tasks and treat them as direct QA tasks.

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Cited by 2 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score. Full citation record

  1. LOOM-Scope: a comprehensive and efficient LOng-cOntext Model evaluation framework

    cs.CL 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    LOOM-Scope is a framework that standardizes long-context LLM evaluation across 22 benchmarks and integrates a lightweight 12-benchmark suite, LOOMBench, for fast comprehensive assessment.

  2. Not All Needles Are Found: How Fact Distribution and Don't Make It Up Prompts Shape Retrieval, Reasoning, and Hallucination in Long-Context LLMs

    cs.CL 2026-01 conditional novelty 5.0 of 10

    On a new extended needle-in-a-haystack benchmark, explicit anti-hallucination prompts and dispersed fact placement cause some long-context LLMs to over-refuse or collapse in accuracy, while others remain robust.

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