@inproceedings{karpinska-etal-2024-one,
title = "One Thousand and One Pairs: A {``}novel{''} challenge for long-context language models",
author = "Karpinska, Marzena and
Thai, Katherine and
Lo, Kyle and
Goyal, Tanya and
Iyyer, Mohit",
editor = "Al-Onaizan, Yaser and
Bansal, Mohit and
Chen, Yun-Nung",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
month = nov,
year = "2024",
address = "Miami, Florida, USA",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.948",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.948",
pages = "17048--17085",
abstract = "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 pair 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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<abstract>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 pair 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.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T One Thousand and One Pairs: A “novel” challenge for long-context language models
%A Karpinska, Marzena
%A Thai, Katherine
%A Lo, Kyle
%A Goyal, Tanya
%A Iyyer, Mohit
%Y Al-Onaizan, Yaser
%Y Bansal, Mohit
%Y Chen, Yun-Nung
%S Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
%D 2024
%8 November
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Miami, Florida, USA
%F karpinska-etal-2024-one
%X 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 pair 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.
%R 10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.948
%U https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.948
%U https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.emnlp-main.948
%P 17048-17085
Markdown (Informal)
[One Thousand and One Pairs: A “novel” challenge for long-context language models](https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.948) (Karpinska et al., EMNLP 2024)
ACL