Sequential-NIAH: A Needle-In-A-Haystack Benchmark for Extracting Sequential Needles from Long Contexts

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Yu, Yifei, Zhang, Qian-Wen, Qiao, Lingfeng, Yin, Di, Li, Fang, Wang, Jie, Chen, Zengxi, Zheng, Suncong, Liang, Xiaolong, Sun, Xing
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Yu, Yifei
Zhang, Qian-Wen
Qiao, Lingfeng
Yin, Di
Li, Fang
Wang, Jie
Chen, Zengxi
Zheng, Suncong
Liang, Xiaolong
Sun, Xing
author_facet Yu, Yifei
Zhang, Qian-Wen
Qiao, Lingfeng
Yin, Di
Li, Fang
Wang, Jie
Chen, Zengxi
Zheng, Suncong
Liang, Xiaolong
Sun, Xing
contents Evaluating the ability of large language models (LLMs) to process lengthy contexts is critical, especially for retrieving query-relevant information embedded within them. We introduce Sequential-NIAH, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the capability of LLMs to extract sequential information items (known as \emph{needles}) from long contexts. The benchmark includes three needle generation pipelines: synthetic-temporal, real-temporal, and real-logical orders, with context lengths ranging from 8K to 128K, which comprises 14,000 samples (2,000 for testing). To facilitate the evaluation of this benchmark, we trained an evaluation model that assesses the correctness of LLM responses by comparing their completeness and sequential consistency against the ground truth, which provides a more reliable evaluation metric than GPT-4 or Claude. We conducted experiments on six well-known LLMs, revealing that even the best-performing model achieved a maximum accuracy of only 63.50% on test set of this benchmark. Further analysis highlights the growing challenges posed by increasing the context length or the number of needles, underscoring substantial room for improvement of LLMs. Additionally, noise analysis validates the reliability and challenge of the benchmark, making Sequential-NIAH an important reference for advancing research on long text information extraction capabilities of LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_04713
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Sequential-NIAH: A Needle-In-A-Haystack Benchmark for Extracting Sequential Needles from Long Contexts
Yu, Yifei
Zhang, Qian-Wen
Qiao, Lingfeng
Yin, Di
Li, Fang
Wang, Jie
Chen, Zengxi
Zheng, Suncong
Liang, Xiaolong
Sun, Xing
Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
Evaluating the ability of large language models (LLMs) to process lengthy contexts is critical, especially for retrieving query-relevant information embedded within them. We introduce Sequential-NIAH, a benchmark specifically designed to evaluate the capability of LLMs to extract sequential information items (known as \emph{needles}) from long contexts. The benchmark includes three needle generation pipelines: synthetic-temporal, real-temporal, and real-logical orders, with context lengths ranging from 8K to 128K, which comprises 14,000 samples (2,000 for testing). To facilitate the evaluation of this benchmark, we trained an evaluation model that assesses the correctness of LLM responses by comparing their completeness and sequential consistency against the ground truth, which provides a more reliable evaluation metric than GPT-4 or Claude. We conducted experiments on six well-known LLMs, revealing that even the best-performing model achieved a maximum accuracy of only 63.50% on test set of this benchmark. Further analysis highlights the growing challenges posed by increasing the context length or the number of needles, underscoring substantial room for improvement of LLMs. Additionally, noise analysis validates the reliability and challenge of the benchmark, making Sequential-NIAH an important reference for advancing research on long text information extraction capabilities of LLMs.
title Sequential-NIAH: A Needle-In-A-Haystack Benchmark for Extracting Sequential Needles from Long Contexts
topic Computation and Language
Information Retrieval
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.04713