BABILong: Testing the Limits of LLMs with Long Context
  Reasoning-in-a-Haystack
Authors: name: Yuri Kuratov; name: Aydar Bulatov; name: Petr Anokhin; name: Ivan Rodkin; name: Dmitry Sorokin; name: Artyom Sorokin; name: Mikhail Burtsev
Published: 2024-06-14 16:00:29

Abstract: In recent years, the input context sizes of large language models (LLMs) have
increased dramatically. However, existing evaluation methods have not kept
pace, failing to comprehensively assess the efficiency of models in handling
long contexts. To bridge this gap, we introduce the BABILong benchmark,
designed to test language models' ability to reason across facts distributed in
extremely long documents. BABILong includes a diverse set of 20 reasoning
tasks, including fact chaining, simple induction, deduction, counting, and
handling lists/sets. These tasks are challenging on their own, and even more
demanding when the required facts are scattered across long natural text. Our
evaluations show that popular LLMs effectively utilize only 10-20\% of the
context and their performance declines sharply with increased reasoning
complexity. Among alternatives to in-context reasoning, Retrieval-Augmented
Generation methods achieve a modest 60\% accuracy on single-fact question
answering, independent of context length. Among context extension methods, the
highest performance is demonstrated by recurrent memory transformers, enabling
the processing of lengths up to 11 million tokens. The BABILong benchmark is
extendable to any length to support the evaluation of new upcoming models with
increased capabilities, and we provide splits up to 1 million token lengths.