Temporal Blind Spots in Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Wallat, Jonas, Jatowt, Adam, Anand, Avishek
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Wallat, Jonas
Jatowt, Adam
Anand, Avishek
author_facet Wallat, Jonas
Jatowt, Adam
Anand, Avishek
contents Large language models (LLMs) have recently gained significant attention due to their unparalleled ability to perform various natural language processing tasks. These models, benefiting from their advanced natural language understanding capabilities, have demonstrated impressive zero-shot performance. However, the pre-training data utilized in LLMs is often confined to a specific corpus, resulting in inherent freshness and temporal scope limitations. Consequently, this raises concerns regarding the effectiveness of LLMs for tasks involving temporal intents. In this study, we aim to investigate the underlying limitations of general-purpose LLMs when deployed for tasks that require a temporal understanding. We pay particular attention to handling factual temporal knowledge through three popular temporal QA datasets. Specifically, we observe low performance on detailed questions about the past and, surprisingly, for rather new information. In manual and automatic testing, we find multiple temporal errors and characterize the conditions under which QA performance deteriorates. Our analysis contributes to understanding LLM limitations and offers valuable insights into developing future models that can better cater to the demands of temporally-oriented tasks. The code is available\footnote{https://github.com/jwallat/temporalblindspots}.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2401_12078
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Temporal Blind Spots in Large Language Models
Wallat, Jonas
Jatowt, Adam
Anand, Avishek
Computation and Language
Large language models (LLMs) have recently gained significant attention due to their unparalleled ability to perform various natural language processing tasks. These models, benefiting from their advanced natural language understanding capabilities, have demonstrated impressive zero-shot performance. However, the pre-training data utilized in LLMs is often confined to a specific corpus, resulting in inherent freshness and temporal scope limitations. Consequently, this raises concerns regarding the effectiveness of LLMs for tasks involving temporal intents. In this study, we aim to investigate the underlying limitations of general-purpose LLMs when deployed for tasks that require a temporal understanding. We pay particular attention to handling factual temporal knowledge through three popular temporal QA datasets. Specifically, we observe low performance on detailed questions about the past and, surprisingly, for rather new information. In manual and automatic testing, we find multiple temporal errors and characterize the conditions under which QA performance deteriorates. Our analysis contributes to understanding LLM limitations and offers valuable insights into developing future models that can better cater to the demands of temporally-oriented tasks. The code is available\footnote{https://github.com/jwallat/temporalblindspots}.
title Temporal Blind Spots in Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.12078