LLMs don't accumulate information over the course of a text the way you'd hope! I think this is why LLMs often feel 'fixated on the wrong thing' or 'overly literal'—they are usually responding using the most relevant single thing they remember, not the aggregate of what was said
Can LLMs accurately aggregate information over long, information-dense texts? Not yet… We introduce Oolong, a dataset of simple-to-verify information aggregation questions over long inputs. No model achieves >50% accuracy at 128K on Oolong!