The instruction-following ability of large language models enables humans to interact with AI agents in a natural way. However, when required to generate responses of a specific length, large language models often struggle to meet users’ needs due to their inherent difficulty in accurately perceiving numerical constraints. To explore the ability of large language models to control the length of generated responses, we propose the Target Length Generation Task (TLG) and design two metrics, Precise Match (PM) and Flexible Match (FM) to evaluate the model’s performance in adhering to specified response lengths. Furthermore, we introduce a novel, model-agnostic approach called Ruler, which employs Meta Length Tokens (MLTs) to enhance the instruction-following ability of large language models under length-constrained instructions. Specifically, Ruler equips LLMs with the ability to generate responses of a specified length based on length constraints within the instructions. Moreover, Ruler can automatically generate appropriate MLT when length constraints are not explicitly provided, demonstrating excellent versatility and generalization. Comprehensive experiments show the effectiveness of Ruler across different LLMs on Target Length Generation Task, e.g., at All Level 27.97 average gain on PM, 29.57 average gain on FM. In addition, we conduct extensive ablation experiments to further substantiate the efficacy and generalization of Ruler. Our code and data is available on the internet.

With the advancement of large language models (LLMs) and the expansion of their context windows, existing long-context benchmarks fall short in effectively evaluating the models’ comprehension and reasoning abilities in extended texts. Moreover, conventional benchmarks relying on F1 metrics often inaccurately score responses: they may undervalue correct answers that differ from the reference responses and overvalue incorrect ones that resemble the reference texts. In response to these limitations, we introduce Marathon, a novel evaluation benchmark that adopts a multiple-choice question format. It is specifically designed to overcome the constraints of previous benchmarks and provide a rapid, precise, and unbiased appraisal of the long-context comprehension skills of large language models. We conducted comprehensive evaluations on the Marathon benchmark with a range of state-of-the-art LLMs and assessed the effectiveness of various optimization strategies tailored for long-context generation. We anticipate that the Marathon benchmark and its associated leaderboard will enable a more precise and equitable evaluation of LLMs’ capabilities in understanding and reasoning over extended contexts.

Long-context modeling capabilities are important for large language models (LLMs) in various applications. However, directly training LLMs with long context windows is insufficient to enhance this capability since some training samples do not exhibit strong semantic dependencies across long contexts.In this study, we propose a data mining framework ProLong that can assign each training sample with a long dependency score, which can be used to rank and filter samples that are more advantageous for enhancing long-context modeling abilities in LLM training. Specifically, we first use delta perplexity scores to measure the Dependency Strength between text segments in a given document. Then, we refine this metric based on the Dependency Distance of these segments to incorporate spatial relationships across long contexts. Final results are calibrated with a Dependency Specificity metric to prevent trivial dependencies introduced by repetitive patterns. Moreover, a random sampling approach is proposed to optimize the computational efficiency of ProLong. Comprehensive experiments on multiple benchmarks indicate that ProLong effectively identifies documents that carry long dependencies, and LLMs trained on these documents exhibit significantly enhanced long-context modeling capabilities.

In this paper, we introduce an innovative pre-training framework TP-Link, which aims to improve context-dependent Text-to-SQL Parsing by leveraging Linking information. This enhancement is achieved through better representation of both natural language utterances and the database schema, ultimately facilitating more effective text-to-SQL conversations. We present two novel pre-training objectives: (i) utterance linking prediction (ULP) task that models intricate syntactic relationships among natural language utterances in context-dependent text-to-SQL scenarios, and (ii) schema linking prediction (SLP) task that focuses on capturing fine-grained schema linking relationships between the utterances and the database schema. Extensive experiments demonstrate that our proposed TP-Link achieves state-of-the-art performance on two leading downstream benchmarks (i.e., SParC and CoSQL).