  Large language models (LLMs), despite their impressive performance in various
language tasks, are typically limited to processing texts within context-window
size. This limitation has spurred significant research efforts to enhance LLMs'
long-context understanding with high-quality long-sequence benchmarks. However,
prior datasets in this regard suffer from shortcomings, such as short context
length compared to the context window of modern LLMs; outdated documents that
have data leakage problems; and an emphasis on short dependency tasks rather
than long dependency tasks. In this paper, we present LooGLE, a Long Context
Generic Language Evaluation benchmark for LLMs' long context understanding.
LooGLE features relatively new documents post-2022, with over 24,000 tokens per
document and 6,000 newly generated questions spanning diverse domains. Human
annotators meticulously crafted more than 1,100 high-quality question-answer
pairs to meet the long dependency requirements. These pairs underwent thorough
cross-validation, yielding the most precise assessment of LLMs' long dependency
capabilities. The evaluation of eight state-of-the-art LLMs on LooGLE revealed
key findings: (i) commercial models outperformed open-sourced models; (ii) LLMs
excelled in short dependency tasks like short question-answering and cloze
tasks but struggled with more intricate long dependency tasks; (iii) in-context
learning and chaining thoughts offered only marginal improvements; (iv)
retrieval-based techniques demonstrated substantial benefits for short
question-answering, while strategies for extending context window length had
limited impact on long context understanding. As such, LooGLE not only provides
a systematic and comprehensive evaluation schema on long-context LLMs, but also
sheds light on future development of enhanced models towards "true long-context
understanding".
