Oolong: Evaluating Long Context Reasoning and Aggregation Capabilities
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Abstract (arXiv)
As model context lengths continue to grow, concerns about whether models effectively use the full context length have persisted. While several carefully designed long-context evaluations have recently been released, these evaluations tend to rely on retrieval from one or more sections of the context, which allows nearly all of the context tokens to be disregarded as noise. This represents only one type of task that might be performed with long context. We introduce Oolong, a benchmark of long-context reasoning tasks that require analyzing individual chunks of text on an atomic level, and then aggregating these analyses to answer distributional questions. Oolong is separated into two task sets: Oolong-synth, a set of naturalistic synthetic tasks, where we can easily ablate components of the reasoning problem; and Oolong-real, a downstream setting which requires reasoning over real-world conversational data. Oolong requires models to reason over large quantities of examples, to perform both classification and counting in-context, and to reason over temporal and user relations. Even frontier models struggle on Oolong, with GPT-5, Claude-Sonnet-4, and Gemini-2.5-Pro all achieving less than 50% accuracy on both splits at 128K. We release the data and evaluation harness for Oolong to enable further development of models that can reason over large quantities of text.
Key facts. Cited by 40 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Builds on 40 of its 63 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 4 Nov 2025.
Builds on
40 of 63 references.
References · 40
- 2025DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learningcited by 6,330
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- 2017A Broad-Coverage Challenge Corpus for Sentence Understanding through Inferencecited by 2,682
- 2015Character-level Convolutional Networks for Text Classificationcited by 2,330
- 2024RULER: What's the Real Context Size of Your Long-Context Language Models?cited by 1,346
- 2024LongMemEval: Benchmarking Chat Assistants on Long-Term Interactive Memorycited by 707
- 2025Stop Overthinking: A Survey on Efficient Reasoning for Large Language Modelscited by 464
- 2024LongBench v2: Towards Deeper Understanding and Reasoning on Realistic Long-context Multitaskscited by 379
- 2024∞Bench: Extending Long Context Evaluation Beyond 100K Tokenscited by 367
- 2015Towards AI-Complete Question Answering: A Set of Prerequisite Toy Taskscited by 314
- 2024BABILong: Testing the Limits of LLMs with Long Context Reasoning-in-a-Haystackcited by 215
- 2023LooGLE: Can Long-Context Language Models Understand Long Contexts?cited by 202
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- 2025NoLiMa: Long-Context Evaluation Beyond Literal Matchingcited by 126
- 2024HELMET: How to Evaluate Long-Context Language Models Effectively and Thoroughlycited by 125
- 2024Michelangelo: Long Context Evaluations Beyond Haystacks via Latent Structure Queriescited by 88
- 2025LongReason: A Synthetic Long-Context Reasoning Benchmark via Context Expansioncited by 50
- 2022Annotation Error Detection: Analyzing the Past and Present for a More Coherent Futurecited by 45
- 2022Dungeons and Dragons as a Dialog Challenge for Artificial Intelligencecited by 35
- 2024NeedleBench: Evaluating LLM Retrieval and Reasoning Across Varying Information Densitiescited by 32
- 2024Over-Reasoning and Redundant Calculation of Large Language Modelscited by 27
- 2024Is It Really Long Context if All You Need Is Retrieval? Towards Genuinely Difficult Long Context NLPcited by 27
- 2023CALYPSO: LLMs as Dungeon Masters' Assistantscited by 23
- 2025MoNaCo: More Natural and Complex Questions for Reasoning Across Dozens of Documentscited by 21
- 2021Database Reasoning Over Textcited by 20
- 2023FIREBALL: A Dataset of Dungeons and Dragons Actual-Play with Structured Game State Informationcited by 18
- 2023This is not a Dataset: A Large Negation Benchmark to Challenge Large Language Modelscited by 18
- 2022Detecting Label Errors by using Pre-Trained Language Modelscited by 16
- 2024MathHay: An Automated Benchmark for Long-Context Mathematical Reasoning in LLMscited by 13
- 2015SQUINKY! A Corpus of Sentence-level Formality, Informativeness, and Implicaturecited by 11
- 2023Do Multi-Document Summarization Models Synthesize?cited by 11
- 2024Exploring Prompt Engineering Practices in the Enterprisecited by 11
- 2024A Taxonomy for Data Contamination in Large Language Modelscited by 11
- 2024Holistic Reasoning with Long-Context LMs: A Benchmark for Database Operations on Massive Textual Datacited by 11
- 2025Conversational User-AI Intervention: A Study on Prompt Rewriting for Improved LLM Response Generationcited by 10
- 2025Too Long, Didn't Model: Decomposing LLM Long-Context Understanding With Novelscited by 9
- 2025LooGLE v2: Are LLMs Ready for Real World Long Dependency Challenges?cited by 8
- 2025User Prompting Strategies and ChatGPT Contextual Adaptation Shape Conversational Information-Seeking Experiencescited by 2
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Citing papers per year: 2025: 2; 2026: 38.
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