NeurIPS Conference 2025 Conference Paper
A Controllable Examination for Long-Context Language Models
- Yijun Yang
- Zeyu Huang
- Wenhao Zhu
- Zihan Qiu
- Fei Yuan
- Jeff Pan
- Ivan Titov
Existing frameworks for evaluating long-context language models (LCLM) can be broadly categorized into real-world applications (e. g, document summarization) and synthetic tasks (e. g, needle-in-a-haystack). Despite their utility, both approaches are accompanied by certain intrinsic limitations. Real-world tasks often involve complexity that makes interpretation challenging and suffer from data contamination, whereas synthetic tasks frequently lack meaningful coherence between the target information ("needle") and its surrounding context ("haystack"), undermining their validity as proxies for realistic applications. In response to these challenges, we posit that an ideal long-context evaluation framework should be characterized by three essential features: 1) seamless context: coherent contextual integration between target information and its surrounding context; 2) controllable setting: an extensible task setup that enables controlled studies—for example, incorporating additional required abilities such as numerical reasoning; and 3) sound evaluation: avoiding LLM-as-Judge and conduct exact-match to ensure deterministic and reproducible evaluation results. This study introduces $\textbf{LongBioBench}$, a benchmark that utilizes artificially generated biographies as a controlled environment for assessing LCLMs across dimensions of $\textit{understanding}$, $\textit{reasoning}$, and $\textit{trustworthiness}$. Our experimental evaluation, which includes $\textbf{18}$ LCLMs in total, demonstrates that most models still exhibit deficiencies in semantic understanding and elementary reasoning over retrieved results and are less trustworthy as context length increases. Our further analysis indicates some design choices employed by existing synthetic benchmarks, such as contextual non-coherence, numerical needles, and the absence of distractors, rendering them vulnerable to test the model's long-context capabilities. Moreover, we also reveal that long-context continual pretraining primarily adjusts RoPE embedding to accommodate extended context lengths, which in turn yields only marginal improvements in the model’s true capabilities. To sum up, compared to previous synthetic benchmarks, LongBioBench achieves a better trade-off between mirroring authentic language tasks and maintaining controllability, and is highly interpretable and configurable.