π We're excited to introduce MemoryCode, a novel synthetic dataset designed to rigorously evaluate LLMs' ability to track and execute coding instructions across multiple sessions. MemoryCode simulates realistic workplace scenarios where a mentee (the LLM) receives coding instructions from a mentor amidst a stream of both relevant and irrelevant information.
π‘ But what makes MemoryCode unique?! The combination of the following:
β Multi-Session Dialogue Histories: MemoryCode consists of chronological sequences of dialogues between a mentor and a mentee, mirroring real-world interactions between coworkers.
β Interspersed Irrelevant Information: Critical instructions are deliberately interspersed with unrelated content, replicating the information overload common in office environments.
β Instruction Updates: Coding rules and conventions can be updated multiple times throughout the dialogue history, requiring LLMs to track and apply the most recent information.
β Prospective Memory: Unlike previous datasets that cue information retrieval, MemoryCode requires LLMs to spontaneously recall and apply relevant instructions without explicit prompts.
β Practical Task Execution: LLMs are evaluated on their ability to use the retrieved information to perform practical coding tasks, bridging the gap between information recall and real-world application.
π Our Findings
1οΈβ£ While even small models can handle isolated coding instructions, the performance of top-tier models like GPT-4o dramatically deteriorates when instructions are spread across multiple sessions.
2οΈβ£ This performance drop isn't simply due to the length of the context. Our analysis indicates that LLMs struggle to reason compositionally over sequences of instructions and updates. They have difficulty keeping track of which instructions are current and how to apply them.
Another impressive model that joined the ranking today is ALLaM-AI/ALLaM-7B-Instruct-preview. After a long wait finally ALLaM is here and it is IMPRESSIVE given its size !
β Evaluating Long Context #2: SCROLLS and ZeroSCROLLS
In this series of posts about tracing the history of long context evaluation, we started with Long Range Arena (LRA). Introduced in 2020, Long Range Arens (LRA) is one of the earliest benchmarks designed to tackle the challenge of long context evaluation. But it wasn't introduced to evaluate LLMs, but rather the transformer architecture in general.
π The SCROLLS benchmark, introduced in 2022, addresses this gap in NLP/LLM research. SCROLLS challenges models with tasks that require reasoning over extended sequences (according to 2022 standards). So, what does it offer?
1οΈβ£ Long Text Focus: SCROLLS (unlike LRA) focus mainly on text and contain inputs with thousands of words, testing models' ability to synthesize information across lengthy documents. 2οΈβ£ Diverse Tasks: Includes summarization, question answering, and natural language inference across domains like literature, science, and business. 3οΈβ£ Unified Format: All datasets are available in a text-to-text format, facilitating easy evaluation and comparison of models.
Building on SCROLLS, ZeroSCROLLS takes long text evaluation to the next level by focusing on zero-shot learning. Other features include:
1οΈβ£ New Tasks: Introduces tasks like sentiment aggregation and sorting book chapter summaries. 2οΈβ£ Leaderboard: A live leaderboard encourages continuous improvement and competition among researchers.
π‘ What are some other landmark benchmarks in the history of long context evaluation? Feel free to share your thoughts and suggestions in the comments.
3C3H AraGen Leaderboard welcomes today deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3 and 12 other models (including the late gpt-3.5 π) to the ranking of best LLMs in Arabic !
Observations: - DeepSeek-v3 ranked 3rd and only Open model among the top 5 !
- A 14B open model (Qwen/Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct) outperforms gpt-3.5-turbo-0125 (from last year). This shows how much we came in advancing and supporting Arabic presence within the LLM ecosystem !
- Contrary to what observed in likelihood-acc leaderboards (like OALL/Open-Arabic-LLM-Leaderboard) further finetuned models like maldv/Qwentile2.5-32B-Instruct actually decreased the performance compared to the original model Qwen/Qwen2.5-32B-Instruct. It's worth to note that the decrease is statiscally insignificant which imply that at best, the out-domain finetuning do not really hurts the model original capabilities acquired during pretraining. Previous work addressed this (finetuning VS pretraining) but more investigation in this regard is required (any PhDs here ? This could be your question ...)
~75% on the challenging GPQA with only 40M parameters π₯π₯³
GREAT ACHIEVEMENT ! Or is it ?
This new Work, "Data Laundering: Artificially Boosting Benchmark Results through Knowledge Distillation", take out the mystery about many models i personally suspected their results. Speacially on leaderboards other than the english one, Like the Open Arabic LLM Leaderbaord OALL/Open-Arabic-LLM-Leaderboard.
The authors of this work, first started by training a model on the GPQA data, which, unsurprisingly, led to the model achieving 100% performance.
Afterward, they trained what they referred to as a 'legitimate' model on legitimate data (MedMCQA). However, they introduced a distillation loss from the earlier, 'cheated' model.
What they discovered was fascinating: the knowledge of GPQA leaked through this distillation loss, even though the legitimate model was never explicitly trained on GPQA during this stage.
This raises important questions about the careful use of distillation in model training, especially when the training data is opaque. As they demonstrated, itβs apparently possible to (intentionally or unintentionally) leak test data through this method.
Unpopular opinion: Open Source takes courage to do !
Not everyone is brave enough to release what they have done (the way they've done it) to the wild to be judged ! It really requires a high level of "knowing wth are you doing" ! It's kind of a super power !