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Long Context Compression with Activation Beacon

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arxiv 2401.03462 v3 pith:4FBCUMWK submitted 2024-01-07 cs.CL cs.AI

Long Context Compression with Activation Beacon

classification cs.CL cs.AI
keywords compressionlongmodelactivationbeacontrainingcontextcontexts
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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Long context compression is a critical research problem due to its significance in reducing the high computational and memory costs associated with LLMs. In this paper, we propose Activation Beacon, a plug-in module for transformer-based LLMs that targets effective, efficient, and flexible compression of long contexts. To achieve this, our method introduces the following technical designs. 1) We directly compress the activations (i.e. keys and values at every layer), rather than leveraging soft prompts to relay information (which constitute a major bottleneck to encapsulate the complex information within long contexts). 2) We tailor the compression workflow, where each fine-grained input unit is progressively compressed, enabling high-quality compression and efficient computation during both training and inference. 3) We train the model through compression-based auto-regression, making full use of plain texts and instructional data to optimize the model's compression performance. 4) During training, we randomly sample a compression ratio at each step, teaching the model to support a wide range of compression configurations. Extensive evaluations are conducted on various long-context tasks whose lengths (e.g., 128K) may far exceed the maximum training length (20K), such as document understanding, few-shot learning, and Needle-in-a-Haystack. Whilst existing methods struggle to handle these challenging tasks, Activation Beacon maintains a comparable performance to the uncompressed baseline across various scenarios, achieving a 2x acceleration in inference time and an 8x reduction of memory costs for KV cache. Our data, model, and code have been released at \url{https://github.com/FlagOpen/FlagEmbedding/}.

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Forward citations

Cited by 14 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. RULER: What's the Real Context Size of Your Long-Context Language Models?

    cs.CL 2024-04 accept novelty 8.0

    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.

  2. Thinking as Compression: Your Reasoning Model is Secretly a Context Compressor

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Reasoning models naturally compress context via thinking traces, with reward-constrained optimization yielding 17-23% gains over baselines on long-context QA at high compression ratios.

  3. EndPrompt: Efficient Long-Context Extension via Terminal Anchoring

    cs.CL 2026-05 conditional novelty 7.0

    EndPrompt induces reliable long-context generalization in LLaMA models from sparse positional supervision via a two-segment short-sequence construction with terminal anchoring.

  4. LongRoPE: Extending LLM Context Window Beyond 2 Million Tokens

    cs.CL 2024-02 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    LongRoPE extends LLM context windows to 2048k tokens via search for non-uniform positional interpolation, progressive fine-tuning from 256k, and short-context readjustment.

  5. SeDeM: Selective Decompression of Hidden-State Memories for Long-Context Question Answering

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    SeDeM stores long contexts as compact query-independent memory blocks, selects only query-relevant blocks, and decompresses them into intermediate decoder hidden states, beating compression baselines on four long-cont...

  6. Understanding Is Done Early: A Depth Division of Labor in Large Language Models and Its Use for Unbounded-Context Memory

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    Long-context memory can be organized by caching intermediate residual states and recomputing only query-conditioned upper layers over a bounded retrieved pack.

  7. What to Keep, What to Forget: A Rate--Distortion View of Memory Compaction in LLMs and Agents

    cs.LG 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0

    KV-cache eviction, prompt compression, recurrent state bounding, and agent memory consolidation are unified as one rate-distortion problem with a shared lower bound, shared failure mode, and transferable mechanisms.

  8. HMARS: A Hierarchical Multi-Agent Memory System for Long-Context Reasoning

    cs.IR 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    HMARS introduces a hierarchical multi-agent memory system that outperforms standard retrieval and other baselines on long-document and multi-turn reasoning tasks through improved evidence coverage.

  9. H$^{2}$MT: Semantic Hierarchy-Aware Hierarchical Memory Transformer

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    H²MT uses offline semantic hierarchy construction, bottom-up memory aggregation, and coarse-to-fine query routing to achieve competitive QA quality with lower memory and latency than flat or retrieval baselines on Lon...

  10. EndPrompt: Efficient Long-Context Extension via Terminal Anchoring

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    EndPrompt induces long-context generalization in LLaMA models via a two-segment short-sequence construction with terminal positional anchoring, outperforming full fine-tuning and prior methods on RULER and LongBench w...

  11. Simplified Sparse Attention via Gist Tokens

    cs.LG 2026-04 conditional novelty 6.0

    SSA uses learned gist tokens to score and selectively unfold relevant context chunks, achieving sparse attention without auxiliary KV caches or architectural changes.

  12. Simplified Sparse Attention via Gist Tokens

    cs.LG 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Gist Sparse Attention uses learnable gist compression tokens as both summaries and routing signals, then selectively unfolds relevant raw chunks for fine-grained attention, outperforming compression and sparse-attenti...

  13. Less is More Tokens: Efficient Math Reasoning via Difficulty-Aware Chain-of-Thought Distillation

    cs.CL 2025-09 reject novelty 4.0

    Difficulty-aware compression of CoT traces plus SFT and DPO lets LLMs shorten reasoning on easy math problems, cutting tokens by up to 30% with mixed accuracy effects.

  14. Toward Efficient Agents: Memory, Tool learning, and Planning

    cs.AI 2026-01 conditional novelty 3.0

    A survey that organizes efficiency techniques for LLM agents into memory, tool learning, and planning, and consolidates benchmarks and metrics for measuring cost-performance trade-offs.