arXiv AI

MUDDLE: Measuring Understanding of Documents under Distractor and Length Effects

MUDDLE is a benchmark designed to disentangle the effects of document length and topical distractors on document question‑answering systems. It contains 270 human‑annotated questions, each tested in five conditions: the source alone, the source with two or four hard negatives (topically similar), and the source with two or four random distractors matched in length and provenance. Experiments with GPT‑5‑mini show that hard negatives reduce accuracy more than length‑matched random distractors, indicating that topical similarity is a more significant source of error than length alone.

arXiv AI
Jun 16

When RAG Hurts: Diagnosing and Mitigating Attention Distraction in Retrieval-Augmented LVLMs

arXiv:2602. 00344v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: While Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) is one of the dominant paradigms for enhancing Large Vision-Language Models (LVLMs) on knowledge-based VQA tasks, recent work attributes RAG failures to insufficient attention towards the retrieved context, proposing to reduce the attention allocated to image tokens.

By Beidi Zhao, Wenlong Deng, Xinting Liao, Yushu Li, Nazim Shaikh, Yao Nie, Xiaoxiao Li
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 9

Structure-Aware Modeling of Multiple-Choice Questions Improves Automatic Difficulty Estimation

arXiv:2606. 08988v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Automatic Question Difficulty Estimation (AQDE) holds growing promise for educational assessment because it has the potential to yield difficulty estimates that are competitive with expert judgment, while helping reduce the time and financial burden associated with pilot administrations and scaling to digital testing contexts.

By Gabriel Ortega, Abelino Jim\'enez, S\'everin Lions, Pablo Dartnell
arXiv AI
Aug 24

MGAL: A Multilingual Granularity-Aware Long-Context Benchmark

MGAL is a new multilingual benchmark for evaluating long‑context large language models, built from United Nations reports in six official UN languages and covering 8K to 128K tokens. It tests four linguistic granularities—word, sentence, paragraph, and document—while also stratifying examples by their position within the document (begin, middle, end). Experiments show that models excel at word‑level tasks but struggle with coarser granularity, and that closed‑source models outperform others in lower‑resource languages, revealing challenges such as local semantic crowding and a fluency‑consistency gap.

By Chunhan Li, Chenglin Xu, Zongyang Zhang, Jiale Liu, Zhuoxi Rao, Xudong Jia, Junxiu He, Menglin Yang, Wenjuan Gong, Zhengzhe Liu, Chengwei Qin
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Aug 17

LENS: In-Context Search via Latent Evidence Exploration over Dynamic Raw Documents

LLM agents increasingly answer questions over dynamic raw-document collections, where files may change before preprocessing, and relevant evidence (spans, sections, pages, or tables) is query-dependent. Existing retrieval-augmented approaches pre-materialize evidence via fixed chunking, embeddings, or persistent indexes: effective for lookup, yet costly, stale-prone, and committed to a granularity before the query is known.