README.md

metadata

license: cc-by-sa-4.0
task_categories:
  - text-generation
language:
  - en
size_categories:
  - 1K<n<10K
configs:
  - config_name: github_prs
    data_files:
      - split: validation
        path: github_prs/validation-*
  - config_name: numerical
    data_files:
      - split: validation
        path: numerical/validation-*
  - config_name: poetry
    data_files:
      - split: validation
        path: poetry/validation-*
dataset_info:
  - config_name: github_prs
    features:
      - name: id
        dtype: int64
      - name: original_context
        dtype: string
      - name: modified_context
        dtype: string
      - name: omitted_context
        sequence: string
      - name: omitted_index
        sequence: int64
      - name: metadata
        struct:
          - name: additions
            dtype: int64
          - name: author
            dtype: string
          - name: deletions
            dtype: int64
          - name: html_url
            dtype: string
          - name: issue_id
            dtype: int64
          - name: merged_at
            dtype: string
          - name: omission_probability
            dtype: float64
          - name: pr_number
            dtype: int64
          - name: repo
            dtype: string
          - name: title
            dtype: string
          - name: total_changes
            dtype: int64
    splits:
      - name: validation
        num_bytes: 9578209
        num_examples: 887
    download_size: 3431644
    dataset_size: 9578209
  - config_name: numerical
    features:
      - name: id
        dtype: int64
      - name: original_context
        dtype: string
      - name: modified_context
        dtype: string
      - name: omitted_context
        sequence: string
      - name: omitted_index
        sequence: int64
      - name: metadata
        struct:
          - name: max_num
            dtype: int64
          - name: min_num
            dtype: int64
          - name: n_numbers
            dtype: int64
          - name: n_omitted
            dtype: int64
          - name: omission_probability
            dtype: float64
          - name: order
            dtype: string
          - name: step_size
            dtype: int64
    splits:
      - name: validation
        num_bytes: 7175806
        num_examples: 1200
    download_size: 4970832
    dataset_size: 7175806
  - config_name: poetry
    features:
      - name: id
        dtype: int64
      - name: original_context
        dtype: string
      - name: modified_context
        dtype: string
      - name: omitted_context
        sequence: string
      - name: omitted_index
        sequence: int64
      - name: metadata
        struct:
          - name: n_omitted
            dtype: int64
          - name: omission_probability
            dtype: float64
          - name: poem_length
            dtype: int64
    splits:
      - name: validation
        num_bytes: 44217657
        num_examples: 1191
    download_size: 29473174
    dataset_size: 44217657

AbsenceBench: Language Models Can't Tell What's Missing

[paper] [code]

Dataset Card for AbsenceBench

AbsenceBench covers three distinct domains:

• Poetry (realistic)
• Numerical sequences (synthetic)
• GitHub pull requests (realistic)

There are 4302 instances in total, with an average context length of 5K tokens.

Data Structure

Each domain contains the following features:

• original_context: string
• modified_context: string
• omitted_context: List[string]
• omitted_index: List[int]
• metadata: Dict Extra information regarding the dataset generation

Data Split

Currently we provide only the validation split. Since all instances of AbsenceBench natually come up with labeled answers according to the task setting, we will not be able to provide an unlabeled test split.

Dataset Construction

We provide the source data for generating the poetry domain, originally from the Gutenberg Poetry Corpus in the poetry_raw subset. Please refer to this repo for scripts and more information.

Citation

If you find this work useful, please cite our paper:

@misc{fu2025absencebenchlanguagemodelscant,
      title={AbsenceBench: Language Models Can't Tell What's Missing}, 
      author={Harvey Yiyun Fu and Aryan Shrivastava and Jared Moore and Peter West and Chenhao Tan and Ari Holtzman},
      year={2025},
      eprint={2506.11440},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.CL},
      url={https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11440}, 
}