Lost-in-Distance: Impact of Contextual Proximity on LLM Performance in Graph Tasks

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Hauptverfasser: Firooz, Hamed, Sanjabi, Maziar, Jiang, Wenlong, Zhai, Xiaoling
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Firooz, Hamed
Sanjabi, Maziar
Jiang, Wenlong
Zhai, Xiaoling
author_facet Firooz, Hamed
Sanjabi, Maziar
Jiang, Wenlong
Zhai, Xiaoling
contents Despite significant advancements, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit blind spots that impair their ability to retrieve and process relevant contextual data effectively. We demonstrate that LLM performance in graph tasks with complexities beyond the "needle-in-a-haystack" scenario-where solving the problem requires cross-referencing and reasoning across multiple subproblems jointly-is influenced by the proximity of relevant information within the context, a phenomenon we term "lost-in-distance". We examine two fundamental graph tasks: identifying common connections between two nodes and assessing similarity among three nodes, and show that the model's performance in these tasks significantly depends on the relative positioning of common edges. We evaluate three publicly available LLMs using various graph encoding techniques that represent graph structures for LLM input. We propose a formulation for the lost-in-distance phenomenon and demonstrate that lost-in-distance and lost-in-the middle phenomenas occur independently. Results indicate that model accuracy can decline by up to 6x as the distance between node connections increases, independent of graph encoding and model size.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2410_01985
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Lost-in-Distance: Impact of Contextual Proximity on LLM Performance in Graph Tasks
Firooz, Hamed
Sanjabi, Maziar
Jiang, Wenlong
Zhai, Xiaoling
Artificial Intelligence
Despite significant advancements, Large Language Models (LLMs) exhibit blind spots that impair their ability to retrieve and process relevant contextual data effectively. We demonstrate that LLM performance in graph tasks with complexities beyond the "needle-in-a-haystack" scenario-where solving the problem requires cross-referencing and reasoning across multiple subproblems jointly-is influenced by the proximity of relevant information within the context, a phenomenon we term "lost-in-distance". We examine two fundamental graph tasks: identifying common connections between two nodes and assessing similarity among three nodes, and show that the model's performance in these tasks significantly depends on the relative positioning of common edges. We evaluate three publicly available LLMs using various graph encoding techniques that represent graph structures for LLM input. We propose a formulation for the lost-in-distance phenomenon and demonstrate that lost-in-distance and lost-in-the middle phenomenas occur independently. Results indicate that model accuracy can decline by up to 6x as the distance between node connections increases, independent of graph encoding and model size.
title Lost-in-Distance: Impact of Contextual Proximity on LLM Performance in Graph Tasks
topic Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.01985