Never Lost in the Middle: Mastering Long-Context Question Answering with Position-Agnostic Decompositional Training

Junqing He, Kunhao Pan, Xiaoqun Dong, Zhuoyang Song, Yibo Liu +5 more
11/15/2023
cs.CLcs.AI

No official code found. Best implementation: hejunqing/never-lost-in-the-middle (2 stars, MIT, last commit 2024-08-13).

Abstract

While large language models (LLMs) are equipped with longer text input capabilities than before, they are struggling to seek correct information in long contexts. The "lost in the middle" problem challenges most LLMs, referring to the dramatic decline in accuracy when correct information is located in the middle. To overcome this crucial issue, this paper proposes to enhance the information searching and reflection ability of LLMs in long contexts via specially designed tasks called Attention Strengthening Multi-doc QA (ASM QA). Following these tasks, our model excels in focusing more precisely on the desired information. Experimental results show substantial improvement in Multi-doc QA and other benchmarks, superior to state-of-the-art models by 13.7% absolute gain in shuffled settings, by 21.5% in passage retrieval task. We release our model, Ziya-Reader to promote related research in the community.

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MIT

Repo for ACL 2024 paper: Never Lost in the Middle: Mastering Long-Context Question Answering with Position-Agnostic Decompositional Training

20Shell, PythonJun 5, 20242 years agoMIT

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Cite this paper

@article{he2023never,
  title  = {Never Lost in the Middle: Mastering Long-Context Question Answering with Position-Agnostic Decompositional Training},
  author = {Junqing He and Kunhao Pan and Xiaoqun Dong and Zhuoyang Song and Yibo Liu and Qianguo Sun and Yuxin Liang and Hao Wang and Enming Zhang and Jiaxing Zhang},
  year   = {2023},
  eprint = {2311.09198},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url    = {http://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09198v2}
}

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