arXiv:2602.04099cs.LGcs.CL2026-02被引 1

发现输入长度会严重扭曲大模型困惑度评估结果,影响公平比较。

Rethinking Perplexity: Revealing the Impact of Input Length on Perplexity Evaluation in LLMs

  • 构建系统级评估框架,显式纳入输入长度变量
  • 滑动窗口使短输入表现虚高,长输入性能被夸大
  • 全精度与量化模型均受长度偏差影响,适合部署评估

困惑度是评估大语言模型预测质量的常用指标,但近期研究显示其在使用无关长输入时可能不可靠,威胁基准测试与系统部署。现有工作多依赖输入过滤和数据集筛选,却未从系统角度系统分析输入长度的影响,也未将其视为影响公平性与效率的关键变量。本文提出LengthBenchmark——一个融合输入长度、评估协议与系统开销的评估框架,对比了两种评分策略(直接累加与固定窗口滑动)在不同上下文长度下的代表性模型表现。不同于以往仅关注准确率的工作,该框架还测量延迟、内存占用与评估成本,将预测性能与实际部署需求关联。通过引入量化模型作为鲁棒性检验,发现长度诱导的偏差在全精度与压缩模型中均持续存在。分析揭示两个关键现象:(i) 滑动窗口评估对短输入表现出明显性能虚高;(ii) 无论全精度或量化模型,随着评估段长度增加,表现均看似提升。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

Perplexity is a widely adopted metric for assessing the predictive quality of large language models (LLMs) and often serves as a reference metric for downstream evaluations. However, recent evidence shows that perplexity can be unreliable, especially when irrelevant long inputs are used, raising concerns for both benchmarking and system deployment. While prior efforts have employed selective input filtering and curated datasets, the impact of input length on perplexity has not been systematically studied from a systems perspective and input length has rarely been treated as a first-class system variable affecting both fairness and efficiency. In this work, we close this gap by introducing LengthBenchmark, a system-conscious evaluation framework that explicitly integrates input length, evaluation protocol design, and system-level costs, evaluating representative LLMs under two scoring protocols (direct accumulation and fixed window sliding) across varying context lengths. Unlike prior work that focuses solely on accuracy-oriented metrics, LengthBenchmark additionally measures latency, memory footprint, and evaluation cost, thereby linking predictive metrics to deployment realities. We further incorporate quantized variants not as a main contribution, but as robustness checks, showing that length-induced biases persist across both full-precision and compressed models. This design disentangles the effects of evaluation logic, quantization, and input length, and demonstrates that length bias is a general phenomenon that undermines fair cross-model comparison. Our analysis yields two key observations: (i) sliding window evaluation consistently inflates performance on short inputs, and (ii) both full-precision and quantized models appear to realise gains as the evaluated segment length grows.

困惑度模型评估系统优化输入长度

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