LongGenBench: Long-context Generation Benchmark

Xiang Liu, Peijie Dong, Xuming Hu, Xiaowen Chu


Abstract
Current long-context benchmarks primarily focus on retrieval-based tests, requiring Large Language Models (LLMs) to locate specific information within extensive input contexts, such as the needle-in-a-haystack (NIAH) benchmark. Long-context generation refers to the ability of a language model to generate coherent and contextually accurate text that spans across lengthy passages or documents. While recent studies show strong performance on NIAH and other retrieval-based long-context benchmarks, there is a significant lack of benchmarks for evaluating long-context generation capabilities. To bridge this gap and offer a comprehensive assessment, we introduce a synthetic benchmark, LongGenBench, which allows for flexible configurations of customized generation context lengths. LongGenBench advances beyond traditional benchmarks by redesigning the format of questions and necessitating that LLMs respond with a single, cohesive long-context answer. Upon extensive evaluation using LongGenBench, we observe that: (1) both API accessed and open source models exhibit performance degradation in long-context generation scenarios, ranging from 1.2% to 47.1%; (2) different series of LLMs exhibit varying trends of performance degradation, with the Gemini-1.5-Flash model showing the least degradation among API accessed models, and the Qwen2 series exhibiting the least degradation in LongGenBench among open source models.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.48
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
865–883
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.48
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Xiang Liu, Peijie Dong, Xuming Hu, and Xiaowen Chu. 2024. LongGenBench: Long-context Generation Benchmark. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 865–883, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
LongGenBench: Long-context Generation Benchmark (Liu et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.48.pdf