In plain words: They tested the same questions after adding extra filler text of different lengths and positions, so only the input length changed. Reasoning accuracy fell well before the model's maximum input size, and better next-word prediction went with worse answers.
Abstract · Same Task, More Tokens: the Impact of Input Length on the Reasoning Performance of Large Language Models
This paper explores the impact of extending input lengths on the capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs). Despite LLMs advancements in recent times, their performance consistency across different input lengths is not well understood. We investigate this aspect by introducing a novel QA reasoning framework, specifically designed to assess the impact of input length. We isolate the effect of input length using multiple versions of the same sample, each being extended with padding of different lengths, types and locations. Our findings show a notable degradation in LLMs' reasoning performance at much shorter input lengths than their technical maximum. We show that the degradation trend appears in every version of our dataset, although at different intensities. Additionally, our study reveals that the traditional metric of next word prediction correlates negatively with performance of LLMs' on our reasoning dataset. We analyse our results and identify failure modes that can serve as useful guides for future research, potentially informing strategies to address the limitations observed in LLMs.
Mosh Levy, Alon Jacoby, Yoav Goldberg
arXiv:2402.14848 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted Feb 19, 2024 · updated Jul 10, 2024
abstract · pdf · html · Accepted to ACL 2024