No More Free Lunch: Corpus Task Complexity Matters as Corpora Grow

Prasann Singhal, Amanda Bertsch, Jacob Steinhardt, Sewon Min

Given a large corpus, the questions one might ask can vary -- from "When was the first human heart transplant?" to "What are all the contradictory claims in this literature?" -- but what makes some questions more challenging than others? In this work, we define a notion of Corpus Task Complexity (CTC) that characterizes tasks by how their difficulty grows with corpus size; for instance, a retrieval query only requires a single linear pass over a corpus, while finding contradictions requires checking a quadratically growing set of claim pairs. Observing that prior work has largely only studied tasks whose difficulty grows linearly with corpus size, which we call low CTC tasks, we introduce 10 new tasks belonging to a class of high CTC whose difficulty grows quadratically or more in corpus size. We find that high-CTC tasks not only grow much more challenging on average at longer contexts for LCLMs, they reverse many modeling conclusions drawn solely from low-CTC evaluations. For instance, efficient block-sparse and hybrid attention approaches consistently match full attention performance on low-CTC tasks, but degrade much more on high-CTC tasks. Large-corpus high-CTC reasoning thus…