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One Thousand and One Pairs: A "novel" challenge for long-context language models

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arxiv 2406.16264 v3 pith:UUSOHELH submitted 2024-06-24 cs.CL cs.AI

One Thousand and One Pairs: A "novel" challenge for long-context language models

classification cs.CL cs.AI
keywords long-contextmodelspairsbenchmarksbooksnochaperformanalysis
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Synthetic long-context LLM benchmarks (e.g., "needle-in-the-haystack") test only surface-level retrieval capabilities, but how well can long-context LLMs retrieve, synthesize, and reason over information across book-length inputs? We address this question by creating NoCha, a dataset of 1,001 minimally different pairs of true and false claims about 67 recently-published English fictional books, written by human readers of those books. In contrast to existing long-context benchmarks, our annotators confirm that the largest share of pairs in NoCha require global reasoning over the entire book to verify. Our experiments show that while human readers easily perform this task, it is enormously challenging for all ten long-context LLMs that we evaluate: no open-weight model performs above random chance (despite their strong performance on synthetic benchmarks), while GPT-4o achieves the highest accuracy at 55.8%. Further analysis reveals that (1) on average, models perform much better on pairs that require only sentence-level retrieval vs. global reasoning; (2) model-generated explanations for their decisions are often inaccurate even for correctly-labeled claims; and (3) models perform substantially worse on speculative fiction books that contain extensive world-building. The methodology proposed in NoCha allows for the evolution of the benchmark dataset and the easy analysis of future models.

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Cited by 7 Pith papers

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

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  4. Where Does Long-Context Supervision Actually Go? Effective-Context Exposure Balancing

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    EXACT re-allocates training supervision by inverse frequency of long effective-context targets, improving NoLiMa and RULER scores by 5-18 points on Qwen and LLaMA models without degrading standard QA or reasoning.

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