RULER shows most long-context LMs drop sharply in performance on complex tasks as length and difficulty increase, with only half maintaining results at 32K tokens.
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LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understanding
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abstract
Although large language models (LLMs) demonstrate impressive performance for many language tasks, most of them can only handle texts a few thousand tokens long, limiting their applications on longer sequence inputs, such as books, reports, and codebases. Recent works have proposed methods to improve LLMs' long context capabilities by extending context windows and more sophisticated memory mechanisms. However, comprehensive benchmarks tailored for evaluating long context understanding are lacking. In this paper, we introduce LongBench, the first bilingual, multi-task benchmark for long context understanding, enabling a more rigorous evaluation of long context understanding. LongBench comprises 21 datasets across 6 task categories in both English and Chinese, with an average length of 6,711 words (English) and 13,386 characters (Chinese). These tasks cover key long-text application areas including single-doc QA, multi-doc QA, summarization, few-shot learning, synthetic tasks, and code completion. All datasets in LongBench are standardized into a unified format, allowing for effortless automatic evaluation of LLMs. Upon comprehensive evaluation of 8 LLMs on LongBench, we find that: (1) Commercial model (GPT-3.5-Turbo-16k) outperforms other open-sourced models, but still struggles on longer contexts. (2) Scaled position embedding and fine-tuning on longer sequences lead to substantial improvement on long context understanding. (3) Context compression technique such as retrieval brings improvement for model with weak ability on long contexts, but the performance still lags behind models that have strong long context understanding capability. The code and datasets are available at https://github.com/THUDM/LongBench.
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representative citing papers
Audits reveal no reasoning benchmark controls position/filler/length jointly; CRE shows LLMs drop up to 88pp on middle-position tasks at 64K context, with diagnostic probe supporting positional cause.
Tensor Cache augments sliding-window attention with an eviction-fed outer-product associative memory and a training correction to improve long-context performance under bounded memory.
DecisionBench supplies a fixed task suite, model pool, delegation interface, and multi-axis metrics to evaluate emergent delegation, showing similar quality across awareness conditions but 15-31 point headroom under perfect delegation.
KVServe delivers up to 9.13x job completion time speedup and 32.8x time-to-first-token reduction by making KV cache compression service-aware and adaptive in disaggregated LLM serving.
OCR-Memory encodes agent trajectories as images with visual anchors and retrieves verbatim text via locate-and-transcribe, yielding gains on long-horizon benchmarks under strict context limits.
Stealth Pretraining Seeding plants persistent unsafe behaviors in LLMs via diffuse poisoned web content that activates on precise triggers and evades standard evaluation.
FASER delivers up to 53% higher throughput and 1.92x lower latency in dynamic LLM serving by adjusting speculative lengths per request, early pruning of rejects, and overlapping draft/verification phases via frontiers.
WORC improves multi-agent LLM reasoning to 82.2% average accuracy by predicting and compensating for the weakest agent via targeted extra sampling rather than uniform reinforcement.
Transactional Attention uses semantic sponsorship from anchor patterns to retain dormant critical tokens in KV caches, achieving 100% credential retrieval at 16 tokens where all prior methods fail.
BridgeEQA creates a new benchmark and EMVR method for embodied agents to perform question answering on real-world bridge inspections using egocentric images and professional reports.
SnapStream deploys sparse KV attention in a production inference system on dataflow accelerators, delivering 4x on-chip memory savings for DeepSeek-671B at 128k context with up to 1832 tokens/sec and minimal accuracy loss on LongBench-v2, AIME24, and LiveCodeBench.
MemoryAgentBench is a new multi-turn benchmark assessing four memory competencies in LLM agents—accurate retrieval, test-time learning, long-range understanding, and selective forgetting—showing that existing methods fall short.
KV cache compression causes task-dependent degradation in high-density reasoning due to disrupted CoT links; ShotKV mitigates this by preserving few-shot examples as indivisible semantic units through phase separation, delivering 9-18% accuracy gains and 11% latency reduction.
FastKV decouples prefill context reduction via Token-Selective Propagation from independent KV cache selection, delivering up to 1.82x prefill and 2.87x decoding speedups while matching decoding-only accuracy.
DuoAttention identifies retrieval heads requiring full KV cache and streaming heads using constant-length cache to reduce memory and latency in long-context LLM inference.
MMCL-Bench shows that even the strongest frontier multimodal models solve fewer than one-third of tasks requiring recovery and application of visual rules, procedures, and empirical patterns.
ReST-KV formulates KV eviction as layer-wise output reconstruction optimization with spatial-temporal smoothing, outperforming baselines by 2.58% on LongBench and 15.2% on RULER while cutting decoding latency by 10.61x at 128k context.
FoE restructures MoE blocks into per-KV-head clusters with sum-based synchronization, removing all-to-all communication in single-node settings and limiting it to intra-node in multi-node settings for up to 5.2x faster inference with comparable quality.
CAFE finds positive distributional Jensen Gaps across five multi-agent LLM architectures under semantic stress, showing that quality drops can coexist with detectable stress geometry compatible with antifragile learning.
FlashRT delivers 2x-7x speedup and 2x-4x GPU memory reduction for prompt injection and knowledge corruption attacks on long-context LLMs versus nanoGCG.
SparKV reduces time-to-first-token by 1.3x-5.1x and energy use by 1.5x-3.3x for on-device LLM inference by adaptively choosing between cloud KV streaming and local computation while overlapping execution and adjusting for runtime conditions.
MemSearch-o1 mitigates memory dilution in agentic LLM search through reasoning-aligned token-level memory growth, retracing with a contribution function, and path reorganization, improving reasoning activation on benchmarks.
LLM agents avoid output stalling and reduce generation tokens by 48-72% via deferred template rendering guided by Output Generation Capacity and a Format-Cost Separation Theorem.
citing papers explorer
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RULER: What's the Real Context Size of Your Long-Context Language Models?
RULER shows most long-context LMs drop sharply in performance on complex tasks as length and difficulty increase, with only half maintaining results at 32K tokens.
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Positional Failures in Long-Context LLMs: A Blind Spot in Reasoning Benchmarks
Audits reveal no reasoning benchmark controls position/filler/length jointly; CRE shows LLMs drop up to 88pp on middle-position tasks at 64K context, with diagnostic probe supporting positional cause.
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Tensor Cache: Eviction-conditioned Associative Memory for Transformers
Tensor Cache augments sliding-window attention with an eviction-fed outer-product associative memory and a training correction to improve long-context performance under bounded memory.
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DecisionBench: A Benchmark for Emergent Delegation in Long-Horizon Agentic Workflows
DecisionBench supplies a fixed task suite, model pool, delegation interface, and multi-axis metrics to evaluate emergent delegation, showing similar quality across awareness conditions but 15-31 point headroom under perfect delegation.
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KVServe: Service-Aware KV Cache Compression for Communication-Efficient Disaggregated LLM Serving
KVServe delivers up to 9.13x job completion time speedup and 32.8x time-to-first-token reduction by making KV cache compression service-aware and adaptive in disaggregated LLM serving.
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OCR-Memory: Optical Context Retrieval for Long-Horizon Agent Memory
OCR-Memory encodes agent trajectories as images with visual anchors and retrieves verbatim text via locate-and-transcribe, yielding gains on long-horizon benchmarks under strict context limits.
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PermaFrost-Attack: Stealth Pretraining Seeding(SPS) for planting Logic Landmines During LLM Training
Stealth Pretraining Seeding plants persistent unsafe behaviors in LLMs via diffuse poisoned web content that activates on precise triggers and evades standard evaluation.
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FASER: Fine-Grained Phase Management for Speculative Decoding in Dynamic LLM Serving
FASER delivers up to 53% higher throughput and 1.92x lower latency in dynamic LLM serving by adjusting speculative lengths per request, early pruning of rejects, and overlapping draft/verification phases via frontiers.
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Weak-Link Optimization for Multi-Agent Reasoning and Collaboration
WORC improves multi-agent LLM reasoning to 82.2% average accuracy by predicting and compensating for the weakest agent via targeted extra sampling rather than uniform reinforcement.
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Transactional Attention: Semantic Sponsorship for KV-Cache Retention
Transactional Attention uses semantic sponsorship from anchor patterns to retain dormant critical tokens in KV caches, achieving 100% credential retrieval at 16 tokens where all prior methods fail.
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BridgeEQA: Virtual Embodied Agents for Real Bridge Inspections
BridgeEQA creates a new benchmark and EMVR method for embodied agents to perform question answering on real-world bridge inspections using egocentric images and professional reports.
-
SnapStream: Efficient Long Sequence Decoding on Dataflow Accelerators
SnapStream deploys sparse KV attention in a production inference system on dataflow accelerators, delivering 4x on-chip memory savings for DeepSeek-671B at 128k context with up to 1832 tokens/sec and minimal accuracy loss on LongBench-v2, AIME24, and LiveCodeBench.
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Evaluating Memory in LLM Agents via Incremental Multi-Turn Interactions
MemoryAgentBench is a new multi-turn benchmark assessing four memory competencies in LLM agents—accurate retrieval, test-time learning, long-range understanding, and selective forgetting—showing that existing methods fall short.
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Semantic Integrity Matters: Benchmarking and Preserving High-Density Reasoning in KV Cache Compression
KV cache compression causes task-dependent degradation in high-density reasoning due to disrupted CoT links; ShotKV mitigates this by preserving few-shot examples as indivisible semantic units through phase separation, delivering 9-18% accuracy gains and 11% latency reduction.
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FastKV: Decoupling of Context Reduction and KV Cache Compression for Prefill-Decoding Acceleration
FastKV decouples prefill context reduction via Token-Selective Propagation from independent KV cache selection, delivering up to 1.82x prefill and 2.87x decoding speedups while matching decoding-only accuracy.
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DuoAttention: Efficient Long-Context LLM Inference with Retrieval and Streaming Heads
DuoAttention identifies retrieval heads requiring full KV cache and streaming heads using constant-length cache to reduce memory and latency in long-context LLM inference.
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MMCL-Bench: Multimodal Context Learning from Visual Rules, Procedures, and Evidence
MMCL-Bench shows that even the strongest frontier multimodal models solve fewer than one-third of tasks requiring recovery and application of visual rules, procedures, and empirical patterns.
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ReST-KV: Robust KV Cache Eviction with Layer-wise Output Reconstruction and Spatial-Temporal Smoothing
ReST-KV formulates KV eviction as layer-wise output reconstruction optimization with spatial-temporal smoothing, outperforming baselines by 2.58% on LongBench and 15.2% on RULER while cutting decoding latency by 10.61x at 128k context.
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Federation of Experts: Communication Efficient Distributed Inference for Large Language Models
FoE restructures MoE blocks into per-KV-head clusters with sum-based synchronization, removing all-to-all communication in single-node settings and limiting it to intra-node in multi-node settings for up to 5.2x faster inference with comparable quality.
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When Stress Becomes Signal: Detecting Antifragility-Compatible Regimes in Multi-Agent LLM Systems
CAFE finds positive distributional Jensen Gaps across five multi-agent LLM architectures under semantic stress, showing that quality drops can coexist with detectable stress geometry compatible with antifragile learning.
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FlashRT: Towards Computationally and Memory Efficient Red-Teaming for Prompt Injection and Knowledge Corruption
FlashRT delivers 2x-7x speedup and 2x-4x GPU memory reduction for prompt injection and knowledge corruption attacks on long-context LLMs versus nanoGCG.
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SparKV: Overhead-Aware KV Cache Loading for Efficient On-Device LLM Inference
SparKV reduces time-to-first-token by 1.3x-5.1x and energy use by 1.5x-3.3x for on-device LLM inference by adaptively choosing between cloud KV streaming and local computation while overlapping execution and adjusting for runtime conditions.
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MemSearch-o1: Empowering Large Language Models with Reasoning-Aligned Memory Growth in Agentic Search
MemSearch-o1 mitigates memory dilution in agentic LLM search through reasoning-aligned token-level memory growth, retracing with a contribution function, and path reorganization, improving reasoning activation on benchmarks.
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When Agents Go Quiet: Output Generation Capacity and Format-Cost Separation for LLM Document Synthesis
LLM agents avoid output stalling and reduce generation tokens by 48-72% via deferred template rendering guided by Output Generation Capacity and a Format-Cost Separation Theorem.
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Accuracy Is Speed: Towards Long-Context-Aware Routing for Distributed LLM Serving
In long-context LLM serving, accuracy becomes speed via retry dynamics, and accuracy-aware routing reduces time-to-correct-answer.
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Transforming External Knowledge into Triplets for Enhanced Retrieval in RAG of LLMs
Tri-RAG turns external knowledge into Condition-Proof-Conclusion triplets and retrieves via the Condition anchor to improve efficiency and quality in LLM RAG.
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IceCache: Memory-efficient KV-cache Management for Long-Sequence LLMs
IceCache combines semantic token clustering with PagedAttention to keep only 25% of the KV cache tokens while retaining 99% accuracy on LongBench and matching or beating prior offloading methods in latency.
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HISA: Efficient Hierarchical Indexing for Fine-Grained Sparse Attention
HISA speeds up fine-grained sparse attention indexers via block-then-token hierarchy, delivering substantial speedups at 64K context with no training and quality matching the original DSA on long-context benchmarks.
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TDA-RC: Task-Driven Alignment for Knowledge-Based Reasoning Chains in Large Language Models
TDA-RC embeds topological patterns from multi-round reasoning into CoT via persistent homology and a repair agent, yielding better accuracy-efficiency trade-offs than ToT or GoT on tested datasets.
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MSA: Memory Sparse Attention for Efficient End-to-End Memory Model Scaling to 100M Tokens
MSA is an end-to-end trainable memory model using sparse attention and document-wise RoPE that scales to 100M tokens with linear complexity and less than 9% degradation.
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Stacked from One: Multi-Scale Self-Injection for Context Window Extension
SharedLLM stacks two copies of a short-context LLM so the lower one compresses context into query-aware multi-grained tokens that are injected only at the lowest layers of the upper one, enabling generalization from 8K training to 128K+ inputs.
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CacheClip: Accelerating RAG with Effective KV Cache Reuse
CacheClip accelerates RAG prefill by up to 3.33x via auxiliary-model-guided selective KV recomputation while retaining 85-91% of full-attention quality on NIAH and LongBench.
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AttnTrace: Contextual Attribution of Prompt Injection and Knowledge Corruption
AttnTrace is an attention-weight-based context traceback method for LLMs that claims higher accuracy and efficiency than prior art like TracLLM while aiding prompt injection detection.
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Accelerating Prefilling via Decoding-time Contribution Sparsity
TriangleMix exploits decoding-time contribution sparsity via a training-free static attention pattern to accelerate LLM prefilling with nearly lossless performance.
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TurboQuant: Online Vector Quantization with Near-optimal Distortion Rate
TurboQuant achieves near-optimal vector quantization distortion for both MSE and inner products via random rotation and per-coordinate scalar quantization, with a formal proof that it matches lower bounds within a factor of approximately 2.7.
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Native Sparse Attention: Hardware-Aligned and Natively Trainable Sparse Attention
NSA is a hardware-aligned sparse attention mechanism that enables end-to-end trainable long-context modeling by combining coarse token compression with fine-grained selection.
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RankFlow: A Multi-Role Collaborative Reranking Workflow Utilizing Large Language Models
RankFlow deploys four LLM roles in sequence to rewrite queries, generate pseudo-answers, summarize passages, and rerank candidates, outperforming prior methods on TREC-DL, BEIR, and NovelEval.
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LightTransfer: Your Long-Context LLM is Secretly a Hybrid Model with Effortless Adaptation
LightTransfer identifies lazy layers in LLMs like LLaMA and replaces their attention with streaming attention to form hybrid models, delivering up to 2.17x throughput with under 1.5% drop on LongBench and strong results on reasoning benchmarks.
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RetrievalAttention: Accelerating Long-Context LLM Inference via Vector Retrieval
RetrievalAttention approximates full attention in long-context LLMs by retrieving relevant KV vectors from CPU-based ANNS indexes with an attention-aware algorithm, achieving near-full accuracy while accessing only 1-3% of the data.
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Ada-KV: Optimizing KV Cache Eviction by Adaptive Budget Allocation for Efficient LLM Inference
Ada-KV is the first head-wise adaptive KV cache budget allocator for LLMs, using a theoretical loss upper bound to allocate eviction differently per attention head and yielding higher quality than uniform methods on long-context benchmarks.
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An Empirical Study of Mamba-based Language Models
An 8B Mamba-2-Hybrid with 43% Mamba-2, 7% attention, and 50% MLP layers exceeds an 8B Transformer by 2.65 points on average across 12 tasks and matches it on 23 long-context tasks while enabling up to 8x faster inference.
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PyramidKV: Dynamic KV Cache Compression based on Pyramidal Information Funneling
PyramidKV dynamically compresses KV cache across layers following pyramidal information funneling, matching full performance at 12% retention and outperforming alternatives at 0.7% retention with up to 20.5 accuracy gains.
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SnapKV: LLM Knows What You are Looking for Before Generation
SnapKV selects clustered important KV positions per attention head from an observation window at the prompt end, yielding 3.6x faster generation and 8.2x better memory efficiency on 16K-token inputs with comparable performance across 16 datasets.
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KIVI: A Tuning-Free Asymmetric 2bit Quantization for KV Cache
KIVI applies asymmetric 2-bit quantization to KV cache with per-channel keys and per-token values, reducing memory 2.6x and boosting throughput up to 3.47x with near-identical quality on Llama, Falcon, and Mistral.
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Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks
StreamingLLM lets finite-window LLMs generalize to infinite-length sequences by retaining initial-token KV states as attention sinks, enabling stable streaming inference up to 4M tokens.
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Efficient Long-Context Modeling in Diffusion Language Models via Block Approximate Sparse Attention
BA-Att introduces pre-downsampled block selection with norm-sorting and diagonal covariance correction to approximate sparse attention, yielding up to 6.95x speedup at 50% sparsity across language, multimodal, and video models.
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StreamIndex: Memory-Bounded Compressed Sparse Attention via Streaming Top-k
Chunked streaming top-k enables CSA indexer execution at 1M sequence length with 6.21 GB peak memory and >=0.998 recall on synthetic V4-shaped inputs.
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Budget-Aware Routing for Long Clinical Text
RCD balances relevance, coverage, and diversity in a knapsack-constrained selection framework, with experiments showing that selector choice and budget level determine optimal unitization strategies on clinical datasets.
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HieraSparse: Hierarchical Semi-Structured Sparse KV Attention
HieraSparse delivers a hierarchical semi-structured sparse KV attention system that achieves 1.2x KV compression and 4.57x decode attention speedup versus prior unstructured sparsity methods at equivalent sparsity, plus up to 1.85x prefill speedup and 1.37x/1.77x speedups with magnitude pruning and
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Nirvana: A Specialized Generalist Model With Task-Aware Memory Mechanism
Nirvana adds a task-aware memory trigger and updater to specialized generalist models, achieving strong general benchmark results, lowest perplexity in biomedicine/finance/law, and improved MRI reconstruction fidelity.