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Jul 31

E^2-LLM: Efficient and Extreme Length Extension of Large Language Models

Typically, training LLMs with long context sizes is computationally expensive, requiring extensive training hours and GPU resources. Existing long-context extension methods usually need additional training procedures to support corresponding long-context windows, where the long-context training data (e.g., 32k) is needed, and high GPU training costs are assumed. To address the aforementioned issues, we propose an Efficient and Extreme length extension method for Large Language Models, called E 2 -LLM, with only one training procedure and dramatically reduced computation cost, which also removes the need to collect long-context data. Concretely, first, the training data of our E 2 -LLM only requires a short length (e.g., 4k), which reduces the tuning cost greatly. Second, the training procedure on the short training context window is performed only once time, and we can support different evaluation context windows at inference. Third, in E 2 - LLM, based on RoPE position embeddings, we introduce two different augmentation methods on the scale and position index parameters for different samples in training. It aims to make the model more robust to the different relative differences when directly interpolating the arbitrary context length at inference. Comprehensive experimental results on multiple benchmark datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our E 2 -LLM on challenging long-context tasks.

  • 14 authors
·
Jan 12, 2024 3

Untie the Knots: An Efficient Data Augmentation Strategy for Long-Context Pre-Training in Language Models

Large language models (LLM) have prioritized expanding the context window from which models can incorporate more information. However, training models to handle long contexts presents significant challenges. These include the scarcity of high-quality natural long-context data, the potential for performance degradation on short-context tasks, and the reduced training efficiency associated with attention mechanisms. In this paper, we introduce Untie the Knots (UtK), a novel data augmentation strategy employed during the continue pre-training phase, designed to efficiently enable LLMs to gain long-context capabilities without the need to modify the existing data mixture. In particular, we chunk the documents, shuffle the chunks, and create a complex and knotted structure of long texts; LLMs are then trained to untie these knots and identify relevant segments within seemingly chaotic token sequences. This approach greatly improves the model's performance by accurately attending to relevant information in long context and the training efficiency is also largely increased. We conduct extensive experiments on models with 7B and 72B parameters, trained on 20 billion tokens, demonstrating that UtK achieves 75\% and 84.5\% accurracy on RULER at 128K context length, significantly outperforming other long context strategies. The trained models will open-source for further research.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 7, 2024

Training Long-Context Vision-Language Models Effectively with Generalization Beyond 128K Context

Long-context modeling is becoming a core capability of modern large vision-language models (LVLMs), enabling sustained context management across long-document understanding, video analysis, and multi-turn tool use in agentic workflows. Yet practical training recipes remain insufficiently explored, particularly for designing and balancing long-context data mixtures. In this work, we present a systematic study of long-context continued pre-training for LVLMs, extending a 7B model from 32K to 128K context with extensive ablations on long-document data. We first show that long-document VQA is substantially more effective than OCR transcription. Building on this observation, our ablations further yield three key findings: i) for sequence-length distribution, balanced data outperforms target-length-focused data (e.g., 128K), suggesting that long-context ability requires generalizable key-information retrieval across various lengths and positions; ii) retrieval remains the primary bottleneck, favoring retrieval-heavy mixtures with modest reasoning data for task diversity; and iii) pure long-document VQA largely preserves short-context capabilities, suggesting that instruction-formatted long data reduces the need for short-data mixing. Based on these findings, we introduce MMProLong, obtained by long-context continued pre-training from Qwen2.5-VL-7B with only a 5B-token budget. MMProLong improves long-document VQA scores by 7.1% and maintains strong performance at 256K and 512K contexts beyond its 128K training window, without additional training. It further generalizes to webpage-based multimodal needle retrieval, long-context vision-text compression, and long-video understanding without task-specific supervision. Overall, our study establishes a practical LongPT recipe and an empirical foundation for advancing long-context vision-language models.

A Little Goes a Long Way: Efficient Long Context Training and Inference with Partial Contexts

Training and serving long-context large language models (LLMs) incurs substantial overhead. To address this, two critical steps are often required: a pretrained LLM typically undergoes a separate stage for context length extension by training on long-context data, followed by architectural modifications to reduce the overhead of KV cache during serving. This paper argues that integrating length extension with a GPU-friendly KV cache reduction architecture not only reduces training overhead during length extension, but also achieves better long-context performance. This leads to our proposed LongGen, which finetunes a pretrained LLM into an efficient architecture during length extension. LongGen builds on three key insights: (1) Sparse attention patterns, such as window attention (attending to recent tokens), attention sink (initial ones), and blockwise sparse attention (strided token blocks) are well-suited for building efficient long-context models, primarily due to their GPU-friendly memory access patterns, enabling efficiency gains not just theoretically but in practice as well. (2) It is essential for the model to have direct access to all tokens. A hybrid architecture with 1/3 full attention layers and 2/3 efficient ones achieves a balanced trade-off between efficiency and long-context performance. (3) Lightweight training on 5B long-context data is sufficient to extend the hybrid model's context length from 4K to 128K. We evaluate LongGen on both Llama-2 7B and Llama-2 70B, demonstrating its effectiveness across different scales. During training with 128K-long contexts, LongGen achieves 1.55x training speedup and reduces wall-clock time by 36%, compared to a full-attention baseline. During inference, LongGen reduces KV cache memory by 62%, achieving 1.67x prefilling speedup and 1.41x decoding speedup.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 2, 2024

QwenLong-L1.5: Post-Training Recipe for Long-Context Reasoning and Memory Management

We introduce QwenLong-L1.5, a model that achieves superior long-context reasoning capabilities through systematic post-training innovations. The key technical breakthroughs of QwenLong-L1.5 are as follows: (1) Long-Context Data Synthesis Pipeline: We develop a systematic synthesis framework that generates challenging reasoning tasks requiring multi-hop grounding over globally distributed evidence. By deconstructing documents into atomic facts and their underlying relationships, and then programmatically composing verifiable reasoning questions, our approach creates high-quality training data at scale, moving substantially beyond simple retrieval tasks to enable genuine long-range reasoning capabilities. (2) Stabilized Reinforcement Learning for Long-Context Training: To overcome the critical instability in long-context RL, we introduce task-balanced sampling with task-specific advantage estimation to mitigate reward bias, and propose Adaptive Entropy-Controlled Policy Optimization (AEPO) that dynamically regulates exploration-exploitation trade-offs. (3) Memory-Augmented Architecture for Ultra-Long Contexts: Recognizing that even extended context windows cannot accommodate arbitrarily long sequences, we develop a memory management framework with multi-stage fusion RL training that seamlessly integrates single-pass reasoning with iterative memory-based processing for tasks exceeding 4M tokens. Based on Qwen3-30B-A3B-Thinking, QwenLong-L1.5 achieves performance comparable to GPT-5 and Gemini-2.5-Pro on long-context reasoning benchmarks, surpassing its baseline by 9.90 points on average. On ultra-long tasks (1M~4M tokens), QwenLong-L1.5's memory-agent framework yields a 9.48-point gain over the agent baseline. Additionally, the acquired long-context reasoning ability translates to enhanced performance in general domains like scientific reasoning, memory tool using, and extended dialogue.

AlibabaTongyiLab TongyiLab
·
Dec 14, 2025 5

MACRO: Advancing Multi-Reference Image Generation with Structured Long-Context Data

Generating images conditioned on multiple visual references is critical for real-world applications such as multi-subject composition, narrative illustration, and novel view synthesis, yet current models suffer from severe performance degradation as the number of input references grows. We identify the root cause as a fundamental data bottleneck: existing datasets are dominated by single- or few-reference pairs and lack the structured, long-context supervision needed to learn dense inter-reference dependencies. To address this, we introduce MacroData, a large-scale dataset of 400K samples, each containing up to 10 reference images, systematically organized across four complementary dimensions -- Customization, Illustration, Spatial reasoning, and Temporal dynamics -- to provide comprehensive coverage of the multi-reference generation space. Recognizing the concurrent absence of standardized evaluation protocols, we further propose MacroBench, a benchmark of 4,000 samples that assesses generative coherence across graded task dimensions and input scales. Extensive experiments show that fine-tuning on MacroData yields substantial improvements in multi-reference generation, and ablation studies further reveal synergistic benefits of cross-task co-training and effective strategies for handling long-context complexity. The dataset and benchmark will be publicly released.

How to Train Long-Context Language Models (Effectively)

We study continued training and supervised fine-tuning (SFT) of a language model (LM) to make effective use of long-context information. We first establish a reliable evaluation protocol to guide model development -- Instead of perplexity or simple needle-in-a-haystack (NIAH) tests, we use a broad set of long-context tasks, and we evaluate models after SFT with instruction data as this better reveals long-context abilities. Supported by our robust evaluations, we run thorough experiments to decide the data mix for continued pre-training, the instruction tuning dataset, and many other design choices. We find that (1) code repositories and books are excellent sources of long data, but it is crucial to combine them with high-quality short data; (2) training with a sequence length beyond the evaluation length boosts long-context performance; (3) for SFT, using only short instruction datasets yields strong performance on long-context tasks. Our final model, ProLong-8B, which is initialized from Llama-3 and trained on 40B tokens, demonstrates state-of-the-art long-context performance among similarly sized models at a length of 128K. ProLong outperforms Llama-3.18B-Instruct on the majority of long-context tasks despite having seen only 5% as many tokens during long-context training. Additionally, ProLong can effectively process up to 512K tokens, one of the longest context windows of publicly available LMs.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 3, 2024 1

Two are better than one: Context window extension with multi-grained self-injection

The limited context window of contemporary large language models (LLMs) remains a huge barrier to their broader application across various domains. While continual pre-training on long-context data is a straightforward and effective solution, it incurs substantial costs in terms of data acquisition and computational resources. To alleviate this issue, we propose SharedLLM, a novel approach grounded in the design philosophy of multi-grained context compression and query-aware information retrieval. SharedLLM is composed of two short-context LLMs such as LLaMA-2, termed upper model and lower model. The lower model functions as a compressor while the upper model acts as a decoder. The upper model receives compressed, multi-grained context information from the lower model and performs context-aware modeling on the running text. Information transfer between the compressor and decoder occurs only at the lowest layers to refrain from long forward paths in the lower model and redundant cross-attention modules in the upper model. Based on this architecture, we introduce a specialized tree-style data structure to efficiently encode, store and retrieve multi-grained contextual information for text chunks. This structure, combined with a search algorithm, enables rapid encoding and retrieval of relevant information from various levels of the tree based on the input query. This entire process, wherein the sender and receiver are derived from the same LLM layer, is referred to as self-injection.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 25, 2024

Stacked from One: Multi-Scale Self-Injection for Context Window Extension

The limited context window of contemporary large language models (LLMs) remains a primary bottleneck for their broader application across diverse domains. Although continual pre-training on long-context data offers a straightforward solution, it incurs prohibitive data acquisition and computational costs. To address this challenge, we propose~\modelname, a novel framework based on multi-grained context compression and query-aware information acquisition. SharedLLM comprises two stacked short-context LLMs: a lower model serving as a compressor and an upper model acting as a decoder. The lower model compresses long inputs into compact, multi-grained representations, which are then forwarded to the upper model for context-aware processing. To maximize efficiency, this information transfer occurs exclusively at the lowest layers, bypassing lengthy forward passes and redundant cross-attention operations. This entire process, wherein the upper and lower models are derived from the same underlying LLM layers, is termed~self-injection. To support this architecture, a specialized tree-based data structure enables the efficient encoding and query-aware retrieval of contextual information. Despite being trained on sequences of only 8K tokens, \modelname~effectively generalizes to inputs exceeding 128K tokens. Across a comprehensive suite of long-context modeling and understanding benchmarks, \modelname~achieves performance superior or comparable to strong baselines, striking an optimal balance between efficiency and accuracy. Furthermore, these design choices allow \modelname~to substantially reduce the memory footprint and yield notable inference speedups (2times over streaming and 3times over encoder-decoder architectures).

  • 4 authors
·
Apr 8

Test-Time Training Done Right

Test-Time Training (TTT) models context dependencies by adapting part of the model's weights (referred to as fast weights) during inference. This fast weight, akin to recurrent states in RNNs, stores temporary memories of past tokens in the current sequence. Existing TTT methods struggled to show effectiveness in handling long-context data, due to their inefficiency on modern GPUs. The TTT layers in many of these approaches operate with extremely low FLOPs utilization (often <5%) because they deliberately apply small online minibatch sizes (e.g., updating fast weights every 16 or 64 tokens). Moreover, a small minibatch implies fine-grained block-wise causal dependencies in the data, unsuitable for data beyond 1D ordered sequences, like sets or N-dimensional grids such as images or videos. In contrast, we pursue the opposite direction by using an extremely large chunk update, ranging from 2K to 1M tokens across tasks of varying modalities, which we refer to as Large Chunk Test-Time Training (LaCT). It improves hardware utilization by orders of magnitude, and more importantly, facilitates scaling of nonlinear state size (up to 40% of model parameters), hence substantially improving state capacity, all without requiring cumbersome and error-prone kernel implementations. It also allows easy integration of sophisticated optimizers, e.g. Muon for online updates. We validate our approach across diverse modalities and tasks, including novel view synthesis with image set, language models, and auto-regressive video diffusion. Our approach can scale up to 14B-parameter AR video diffusion model on sequences up to 56K tokens. In our longest sequence experiment, we perform novel view synthesis with 1 million context length. We hope this work will inspire and accelerate new research in the field of long-context modeling and test-time training. Website: https://tianyuanzhang.com/projects/ttt-done-right

  • 9 authors
·
May 29, 2025

OmChat: A Recipe to Train Multimodal Language Models with Strong Long Context and Video Understanding

We introduce OmChat, a model designed to excel in handling long contexts and video understanding tasks. OmChat's new architecture standardizes how different visual inputs are processed, making it more efficient and adaptable. It uses a dynamic vision encoding process to effectively handle images of various resolutions, capturing fine details across a range of image qualities. OmChat utilizes an active progressive multimodal pretraining strategy, which gradually increases the model's capacity for long contexts and enhances its overall abilities. By selecting high-quality data during training, OmChat learns from the most relevant and informative data points. With support for a context length of up to 512K, OmChat demonstrates promising performance in tasks involving multiple images and videos, outperforming most open-source models in these benchmarks. Additionally, OmChat proposes a prompting strategy for unifying complex multimodal inputs including single image text, multi-image text and videos, and achieving competitive performance on single-image benchmarks. To further evaluate the model's capabilities, we proposed a benchmark dataset named Temporal Visual Needle in a Haystack. This dataset assesses OmChat's ability to comprehend temporal visual details within long videos. Our analysis highlights several key factors contributing to OmChat's success: support for any-aspect high image resolution, the active progressive pretraining strategy, and high-quality supervised fine-tuning datasets. This report provides a detailed overview of OmChat's capabilities and the strategies that enhance its performance in visual understanding.

  • 10 authors
·
Jul 5, 2024

GENERator: A Long-Context Generative Genomic Foundation Model

Advancements in DNA sequencing technologies have significantly improved our ability to decode genomic sequences. However, the prediction and interpretation of these sequences remain challenging due to the intricate nature of genetic material. Large language models (LLMs) have introduced new opportunities for biological sequence analysis. Recent developments in genomic language models have underscored the potential of LLMs in deciphering DNA sequences. Nonetheless, existing models often face limitations in robustness and application scope, primarily due to constraints in model structure and training data scale. To address these limitations, we present GENERator, a generative genomic foundation model featuring a context length of 98k base pairs (bp) and 1.2B parameters. Trained on an expansive dataset comprising 386B bp of eukaryotic DNA, the GENERator demonstrates state-of-the-art performance across both established and newly proposed benchmarks. The model adheres to the central dogma of molecular biology, accurately generating protein-coding sequences that translate into proteins structurally analogous to known families. It also shows significant promise in sequence optimization, particularly through the prompt-responsive generation of promoter sequences with specific activity profiles. These capabilities position the GENERator as a pivotal tool for genomic research and biotechnological advancement, enhancing our ability to interpret and predict complex biological systems and enabling precise genomic interventions.

  • 8 authors
·
Feb 11, 2025

DenseOn with the LateOn: Fully Open Dense and Late-Interaction Models for Multilingual, Long-Context, and Code Search

State-of-the-art retrieval models increasingly rely on closed training data, creating a reproducibility gap. We present an open end-to-end recipe for training retrieval models and study how English supervision transfers to multilingual retrieval through translate-train. We first reconstruct and curate 665M English contrastive pre-training pairs from 1.4B pairs across 34 public sources and build 1.88M supervised fine-tuning pairs with mined hard negatives. Training yields two 149M-parameter models: DenseOn, a single-vector dense model, and LateOn, a ColBERT-style late-interaction model. They achieve 56.20 and 57.22 average nDCG@10 on BEIR, respectively, setting new state-of-the-art results for this size class. We then translate the validated English data into eight languages, yielding 2.8B pairs with cross-lingual samples, and train mDenseOn and mLateOn, two 307M-parameter models built on mmBERT-base. Despite sharing their backbone, data, and objectives, their representations behave differently: the dense model is strong on English and translated languages but degrades outside translate-train support, whereas the late-interaction model generalizes better to unseen languages and scripts. This suggests that token-level matching turns translate-train from a target-language expansion strategy into a multilingual generalization recipe. We publicly release the models, datasets, and training code.

  • 4 authors
·
Jul 28

LAWCAT: Efficient Distillation from Quadratic to Linear Attention with Convolution across Tokens for Long Context Modeling

Although transformer architectures have achieved state-of-the-art performance across diverse domains, their quadratic computational complexity with respect to sequence length remains a significant bottleneck, particularly for latency-sensitive long-context applications. While recent linear-complexity alternatives are increasingly powerful, effectively training them from scratch is still resource-intensive. To overcome these limitations, we propose LAWCAT (Linear Attention with Convolution Across Time), a novel linearization framework designed to efficiently transfer the capabilities of pre-trained transformers into a performant linear attention architecture. LAWCAT integrates causal Conv1D layers to enhance local dependency modeling and employs normalized gated linear attention to improve generalization across varying context lengths. Our comprehensive evaluations demonstrate that, distilling Mistral-7B with only 1K-length sequences yields over 90\% passkey retrieval accuracy up to 22K tokens, significantly extending its effective context window. Similarly, Llama3.2-1B LAWCAT variant achieves competitive performance on S-NIAH 1\&2\&3 tasks (1K-8K context length) and BABILong benchmark (QA2\&QA3, 0K-16K context length), requiring less than 0.1\% pre-training tokens compared with pre-training models. Furthermore, LAWCAT exhibits faster prefill speeds than FlashAttention-2 for sequences exceeding 8K tokens. LAWCAT thus provides an efficient pathway to high-performance, long-context linear models suitable for edge deployment, reducing reliance on extensive long-sequence training data and computational resources.

  • 8 authors
·
Sep 22, 2025

Extracting alignment data in open models

In this work, we show that it is possible to extract significant amounts of alignment training data from a post-trained model -- useful to steer the model to improve certain capabilities such as long-context reasoning, safety, instruction following, and maths. While the majority of related work on memorisation has focused on measuring success of training data extraction through string matching, we argue that embedding models are better suited for our specific goals. Distances measured through a high quality embedding model can identify semantic similarities between strings that a different metric such as edit distance will struggle to capture. In fact, in our investigation, approximate string matching would have severely undercounted (by a conservative estimate of 10times) the amount of data that can be extracted due to trivial artifacts that deflate the metric. Interestingly, we find that models readily regurgitate training data that was used in post-training phases such as SFT or RL. We show that this data can be then used to train a base model, recovering a meaningful amount of the original performance. We believe our work exposes a possibly overlooked risk towards extracting alignment data. Finally, our work opens up an interesting discussion on the downstream effects of distillation practices: since models seem to be regurgitating aspects of their training set, distillation can therefore be thought of as indirectly training on the model's original dataset.

google Google
·
Oct 21, 2025 5

MedGemma 1.5 Technical Report

We introduce MedGemma 1.5 4B, the latest model in the MedGemma collection. MedGemma 1.5 expands on MedGemma 1 by integrating additional capabilities: high-dimensional medical imaging (CT/MRI volumes and histopathology whole slide images), anatomical localization via bounding boxes, multi-timepoint chest X-ray analysis, and improved medical document understanding (lab reports, electronic health records). We detail the innovations required to enable these modalities within a single architecture, including new training data, long-context 3D volume slicing, and whole-slide pathology sampling. Compared to MedGemma 1 4B, MedGemma 1.5 4B demonstrates significant gains in these new areas, improving 3D MRI condition classification accuracy by 11% and 3D CT condition classification by 3% (absolute improvements). In whole slide pathology imaging, MedGemma 1.5 4B achieves a 47% macro F1 gain. Additionally, it improves anatomical localization with a 35% increase in Intersection over Union on chest X-rays and achieves a 4% macro accuracy for longitudinal (multi-timepoint) chest x-ray analysis. Beyond its improved multimodal performance over MedGemma 1, MedGemma 1.5 improves on text-based clinical knowledge and reasoning, improving by 5% on MedQA accuracy and 22% on EHRQA accuracy. It also achieves an average of 18% macro F1 on 4 different lab report information extraction datasets (EHR Datasets 2, 3, 4, and Mendeley Clinical Laboratory Test Reports). Taken together, MedGemma 1.5 serves as a robust, open resource for the community, designed as an improved foundation on which developers can create the next generation of medical AI systems. Resources and tutorials for building upon MedGemma 1.5 can be found at https://goo.gle/MedGemma.

  • 42 authors
·
Apr 5 1

QuitoBench: A High-Quality Open Time Series Forecasting Benchmark

Time series forecasting is critical across finance, healthcare, and cloud computing, yet progress is constrained by a fundamental bottleneck: the scarcity of large-scale, high-quality benchmarks. To address this gap, we introduce QuitoBench, a regime-balanced benchmark for time series forecasting with coverage across eight trendtimesseasonalitytimesforecastability (TSF) regimes, designed to capture forecasting-relevant properties rather than application-defined domain labels. The benchmark is built upon Quito, a billion-scale time series corpus of application traffic from Alipay spanning nine business domains. Benchmarking 10 models from deep learning, foundation models, and statistical baselines across 232,200 evaluation instances, we report four key findings: (i) a context-length crossover where deep learning models lead at short context (L=96) but foundation models dominate at long context (L ge 576); (ii) forecastability is the dominant difficulty driver, producing a 3.64 times MAE gap across regimes; (iii) deep learning models match or surpass foundation models at 59 times fewer parameters; and (iv) scaling the amount of training data provides substantially greater benefit than scaling model size for both model families. These findings are validated by strong cross-benchmark and cross-metric consistency. Our open-source release enables reproducible, regime-aware evaluation for time series forecasting research.

  • 10 authors
·
Mar 26 3

SoLoPO: Unlocking Long-Context Capabilities in LLMs via Short-to-Long Preference Optimization

Despite advances in pretraining with extended context lengths, large language models (LLMs) still face challenges in effectively utilizing real-world long-context information, primarily due to insufficient long-context alignment caused by data quality issues, training inefficiencies, and the lack of well-designed optimization objectives. To address these limitations, we propose a framework named Short-to-Long Preference Optimization (SoLoPO), decoupling long-context preference optimization (PO) into two components: short-context PO and short-to-long reward alignment (SoLo-RA), supported by both theoretical and empirical evidence. Specifically, short-context PO leverages preference pairs sampled from short contexts to enhance the model's contextual knowledge utilization ability. Meanwhile, SoLo-RA explicitly encourages reward score consistency utilization for the responses when conditioned on both short and long contexts that contain identical task-relevant information. This facilitates transferring the model's ability to handle short contexts into long-context scenarios. SoLoPO is compatible with mainstream preference optimization algorithms, while substantially improving the efficiency of data construction and training processes. Experimental results show that SoLoPO enhances all these algorithms with respect to stronger length and domain generalization abilities across various long-context benchmarks, while achieving notable improvements in both computational and memory efficiency.

  • 11 authors
·
May 16, 2025

When Does Sparsity Mitigate the Curse of Depth in LLMs

Recent work has demonstrated the curse of depth in large language models (LLMs), where later layers contribute less to learning and representation than earlier layers. Such under-utilization is linked to the accumulated growth of variance in Pre-Layer Normalization, which can push deep blocks toward near-identity behavior. In this paper, we demonstrate that, sparsity, beyond enabling efficiency, acts as a regulator of variance propagation and thereby improves depth utilization. Our investigation covers two sources of sparsity: (i) implicit sparsity, which emerges from training and data conditions, including weight sparsity induced by weight decay and attention sparsity induced by long context inputs; and (ii) explicit sparsity, which is enforced by architectural design, including key/value-sharing sparsity in Grouped-Query Attention and expert-activation sparsity in Mixtureof-Experts. Our claim is thoroughly supported by controlled depth-scaling experiments and targeted layer effectiveness interventions. Across settings, we observe a consistent relationship: sparsity improves layer utilization by reducing output variance and promoting functional differentiation. We eventually distill our findings into a practical rule-of-thumb recipe for training deptheffective LLMs, yielding a notable 4.6% accuracy improvement on downstream tasks. Our results reveal sparsity, arising naturally from standard design choices, as a key yet previously overlooked mechanism for effective depth scaling in LLMs. Code is available at https://github.com/pUmpKin-Co/SparsityAndCoD.

Efficient Long-context Language Model Training by Core Attention Disaggregation

We present core attention disaggregation (CAD), a technique that improves long-context large language model training by decoupling the core attention computation, softmax(QK^T)V, from the rest of the model and executing it on a separate pool of devices. In existing systems, core attention is colocated with other layers; at long context lengths, its quadratic compute growth compared to the near-linear growth of other components causes load imbalance and stragglers across data and pipeline parallel groups. CAD is enabled by two observations. First, core attention is stateless: it has no trainable parameters and only minimal transient data, so balancing reduces to scheduling compute-bound tasks. Second, it is composable: modern attention kernels retain high efficiency when processing fused batches of token-level shards with arbitrary lengths. CAD partitions core attention into token-level tasks and dispatches them to dedicated attention servers, which dynamically rebatch tasks to equalize compute without sacrificing kernel efficiency. We implement CAD in a system called DistCA, which uses a ping-pong execution scheme to fully overlap communication with computation and in-place execution on attention servers to reduce memory use. On 512 H200 GPUs and context lengths up to 512k tokens, DistCA improves end-to-end training throughput by up to 1.35x, eliminates data and pipeline parallel stragglers, and achieves near-perfect compute and memory balance.

  • 9 authors
·
Oct 20, 2025 5

LOGO -- Long cOntext aliGnment via efficient preference Optimization

Long-context models(LCMs) have shown great potential in processing long input sequences(even more than 100M tokens) conveniently and effectively. With significant progress, recent research has pointed out that LCMs can accurately locate token-level salient information within the context. Yet, the generation performance of these LCMs is far from satisfactory and might result in misaligned responses, such as hallucinations. To enhance the generation capability of LCMs, existing works have investigated the effects of data size and quality for both pre-training and instruction tuning. Though achieving meaningful improvement, previous methods fall short in either effectiveness or efficiency. In this paper, we introduce LOGO(Long cOntext aliGnment via efficient preference Optimization), a training strategy that first introduces preference optimization for long-context alignment. To overcome the GPU memory-bound issue caused by the long sequence, LOGO employs a reference-free preference optimization strategy and adopts a position synthesis method to construct the training data. By training with only 0.3B data on a single 8timesA800 GPU machine for 16 hours, LOGO allows the Llama-3-8B-Instruct-80K model to achieve comparable performance with GPT-4 in real-world long-context tasks while preserving the model's original capabilities on other tasks, e.g., language modeling and MMLU. Moreover, LOGO can extend the model's context window size while enhancing its generation performance.

  • 5 authors
·
Oct 24, 2024 2

Data-Centric and Heterogeneity-Adaptive Sequence Parallelism for Efficient LLM Training

Extending the context length (i.e., the maximum supported sequence length) of LLMs is of paramount significance. To facilitate long context training of LLMs, sequence parallelism has emerged as an essential technique, which scatters each input sequence across multiple devices and necessitates communication to process the sequence. In essence, existing sequence parallelism methods assume homogeneous sequence lengths (i.e., all input sequences are equal in length) and therefore leverages a single, static scattering strategy for all input sequences. However, in reality, the sequence lengths in LLM training corpora exhibit substantial variability, often following a long-tail distribution, which leads to workload heterogeneity. In this paper, we show that employing a single, static strategy results in inefficiency and resource under-utilization, highlighting the need for adaptive approaches to handle the heterogeneous workloads across sequences. To address this, we propose a heterogeneity-adaptive sequence parallelism method. For each training step, our approach captures the variability in sequence lengths and assigns the optimal combination of scattering strategies based on workload characteristics. We model this problem as a linear programming optimization and design an efficient and effective solver to find the optimal solution. Furthermore, we implement our method in a high-performance system that supports adaptive parallelization in distributed LLM training. Experimental results demonstrate that our system outperforms state-of-the-art training frameworks by up to 1.98x.

  • 10 authors
·
Dec 2, 2024

LongTraceRL: Learning Long-Context Reasoning from Search Agent Trajectories with Rubric Rewards

Long-context reasoning remains a central challenge for large language models, which often fail to locate and integrate key information in extensive distracting content. Reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) has shown promise for this task, yet existing methods are limited by low-confusability distractors and sparse, outcome-only reward signals that cannot supervise intermediate reasoning steps. To address these issues, we introduce LongTraceRL. For data construction, we generate multi-hop questions via knowledge graph random walks and leverage search agent trajectories to build tiered distractors: documents the agent read but did not cite (high confusability) and documents that appeared in search results but were never opened (low confusability), producing training contexts that are far more challenging than those built by random sampling or one-shot search. For reward design, we propose a rubric reward that uses the gold entities along each reasoning chain as fine-grained, entity-level process supervision. This rubric reward is applied only to responses with correct final answers (positive-only strategy), distinguishing the reasoning quality among correct responses and preventing reward hacking. Experiments on three reasoning LLMs (4B--30B) across five long-context benchmarks demonstrate that LongTraceRL consistently outperforms strong baselines and encourages comprehensive, evidence-grounded reasoning. Codes, datasets and models are available at https://github.com/THU-KEG/LongTraceRL{https://github.com/THU-KEG/LongTraceRL}.

Semantic Soft Bootstrapping: Long Context Reasoning in LLMs without Reinforcement Learning

Long context reasoning in large language models (LLMs) has demonstrated enhancement of their cognitive capabilities via chain-of-thought (CoT) inference. Training such models is usually done via reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards (RLVR) in reasoning based problems, like math and programming. However, RLVR is limited by several bottlenecks, such as, lack of dense reward, and inadequate sample efficiency. As a result, it requires significant compute resources in post-training phase. To overcome these limitations, in this work, we propose Semantic Soft Bootstrapping (SSB), a self-distillation technique, in which the same base language model plays the role of both teacher and student, but receives different semantic contexts about the correctness of its outcome at training time. The model is first prompted with a math problem and several rollouts are generated. From them, the correct and most common incorrect response are filtered, and then provided to the model in context to produce a more robust, step-by-step explanation with a verified final answer. This pipeline automatically curates a paired teacher-student training set from raw problem-answer data, without any human intervention. This generation process also produces a sequence of logits, which is what the student model tries to match in the training phase just from the bare question alone. In our experiment, Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct on GSM8K dataset via parameter-efficient fine-tuning. We then tested its accuracy on MATH500, and AIME2024 benchmarks. Our experiments show a jump of 10.6%, and 10% improvements in accuracy, respectively, over group relative policy optimization (GRPO), which is a commonly used RLVR algorithm. Our code is available at https://github.com/purbeshmitra/semantic-soft-bootstrapping, and the model, curated dataset is available at https://huggingface.co/purbeshmitra/semantic-soft-bootstrapping.

  • 2 authors
·
Dec 4, 2025

AfriqueLLM: How Data Mixing and Model Architecture Impact Continued Pre-training for African Languages

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly multilingual, yet open models continue to underperform relative to proprietary systems, with the gap most pronounced for African languages. Continued pre-training (CPT) offers a practical route to language adaptation, but improvements on demanding capabilities such as mathematical reasoning often remain limited. This limitation is driven in part by the uneven domain coverage and missing task-relevant knowledge that characterize many low-resource language corpora. We present AfriqueLLM, a suite of open LLMs adapted to 20 African languages through CPT on 26B tokens. We perform a comprehensive empirical study across five base models spanning sizes and architectures, including Llama 3.1, Gemma 3, and Qwen 3, and systematically analyze how CPT data composition shapes downstream performance. In particular, we vary mixtures that include math, code, and synthetic translated data, and evaluate the resulting models on a range of multilingual benchmarks. Our results identify data composition as the primary driver of CPT gains. Adding math, code, and synthetic translated data yields consistent improvements, including on reasoning-oriented evaluations. Within a fixed architecture, larger models typically improve performance, but architectural choices dominate scale when comparing across model families. Moreover, strong multilingual performance in the base model does not reliably predict post-CPT outcomes; robust architectures coupled with task-aligned data provide a more dependable recipe. Finally, our best models improve long-context performance, including document-level translation. Models have been released on [Huggingface](https://huggingface.co/collections/McGill-NLP/afriquellm).

  • 6 authors
·
Jan 9

Long-Context LLMs Meet RAG: Overcoming Challenges for Long Inputs in RAG

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) empowers large language models (LLMs) to utilize external knowledge sources. The increasing capacity of LLMs to process longer input sequences opens up avenues for providing more retrieved information, to potentially enhance the quality of generated outputs. It is plausible to assume that a larger retrieval set would contain more relevant information (higher recall), that might result in improved performance. However, our empirical findings demonstrate that for many long-context LLMs, the quality of generated output initially improves first, but then subsequently declines as the number of retrieved passages increases. This paper investigates this phenomenon, identifying the detrimental impact of retrieved "hard negatives" as a key contributor. To mitigate this and enhance the robustness of long-context LLM-based RAG, we propose both training-free and training-based approaches. We first showcase the effectiveness of retrieval reordering as a simple yet powerful training-free optimization. Furthermore, we explore training-based methods, specifically RAG-specific implicit LLM fine-tuning and RAG-oriented fine-tuning with intermediate reasoning, demonstrating their capacity for substantial performance gains. Finally, we conduct a systematic analysis of design choices for these training-based methods, including data distribution, retriever selection, and training context length.

  • 4 authors
·
Oct 8, 2024

OPSDL: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Long-Context Language Models

Extending the effective context length of large language models (LLMs) remains a central challenge for real-world applications. While recent post-training methods have made progress in long-context scaling, they either rely on high-quality supervision data or sparse sequence-level rewards, leading to unstable and inefficient optimization. We propose OPSDL, an On-Policy Self-Distillation method for enhancing the Long-context capabilities of LLMs. Unlike other recent self-distillation methods that inject privileged information and rely on the model's in-context learning ability to act as a teacher, OPSDL leverages the model's own inherently strong short-context capability as a self-teacher to supervise its own generation in long-context scenarios. The model first generates responses conditioned on the full long-context, then the self-teacher provides per-token supervision signals via point-wise reverse KL divergence under the relevant extracted short-context. This dense token-level signal encourages faithful use of relevant evidence and mitigates hallucinations induced by irrelevant context. We evaluate OPSDL on long-context benchmarks across a range of models from 7B to 32B parameters. Results show consistent and substantial improvements across varying context lengths, outperforming standard post-training approaches such as SFT and DPO with higher sample efficiency. Notably, these gains are achieved without degrading general short-context performance. These findings highlight the effectiveness of OPSDL as a scalable and stable approach for long-context learning.

  • 7 authors
·
Apr 18

Effective Long-Context Scaling of Foundation Models

We present a series of long-context LLMs that support effective context windows of up to 32,768 tokens. Our model series are built through continual pretraining from Llama 2 with longer training sequences and on a dataset where long texts are upsampled. We perform extensive evaluation on language modeling, synthetic context probing tasks, and a wide range of research benchmarks. On research benchmarks, our models achieve consistent improvements on most regular tasks and significant improvements on long-context tasks over Llama 2. Notably, with a cost-effective instruction tuning procedure that does not require human-annotated long instruction data, the 70B variant can already surpass gpt-3.5-turbo-16k's overall performance on a suite of long-context tasks. Alongside these results, we provide an in-depth analysis on the individual components of our method. We delve into Llama's position encodings and discuss its limitation in modeling long dependencies. We also examine the impact of various design choices in the pretraining process, including the data mix and the training curriculum of sequence lengths -- our ablation experiments suggest that having abundant long texts in the pretrain dataset is not the key to achieving strong performance, and we empirically verify that long context continual pretraining is more efficient and similarly effective compared to pretraining from scratch with long sequences.

  • 21 authors
·
Sep 27, 2023 3

Efficient Long Context Fine-tuning with Chunk Flow

Long context fine-tuning of large language models(LLMs) involves training on datasets that are predominantly composed of short sequences and a small proportion of longer sequences. However, existing approaches overlook this long-tail distribution and employ training strategies designed specifically for long sequences. Moreover, these approaches also fail to address the challenges posed by variable sequence lengths during distributed training, such as load imbalance in data parallelism and severe pipeline bubbles in pipeline parallelism. These issues lead to suboptimal training performance and poor GPU resource utilization. To tackle these problems, we propose a chunk-centric training method named ChunkFlow. ChunkFlow reorganizes input sequences into uniformly sized chunks by consolidating short sequences and splitting longer ones. This approach achieves optimal computational efficiency and balance among training inputs. Additionally, ChunkFlow incorporates a state-aware chunk scheduling mechanism to ensure that the peak memory usage during training is primarily determined by the chunk size rather than the maximum sequence length in the dataset. Integrating this scheduling mechanism with existing pipeline scheduling algorithms further enhances the performance of distributed training. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with Megatron-LM, ChunkFlow can be up to 4.53x faster in the long context fine-tuning of LLMs. Furthermore, we believe that ChunkFlow serves as an effective solution for a broader range of scenarios, such as long context continual pre-training, where datasets contain variable-length sequences.

  • 13 authors
·
Mar 4, 2025

ByteScale: Efficient Scaling of LLM Training with a 2048K Context Length on More Than 12,000 GPUs

Scaling long-context ability is essential for Large Language Models (LLMs). To amortize the memory consumption across multiple devices in long-context training, inter-data partitioning (a.k.a. Data Parallelism) and intra-data partitioning (a.k.a. Context Parallelism) are commonly used. Current training frameworks predominantly treat the two techniques as orthogonal, and establish static communication groups to organize the devices as a static mesh (e.g., a 2D mesh). However, the sequences for LLM training typically vary in lengths, no matter for texts, multi-modalities or reinforcement learning. The mismatch between data heterogeneity and static mesh causes redundant communication and imbalanced computation, degrading the training efficiency. In this work, we introduce ByteScale, an efficient, flexible, and scalable LLM training framework for large-scale mixed training of long and short sequences. The core of ByteScale is a novel parallelism strategy, namely Hybrid Data Parallelism (HDP), which unifies the inter- and intra-data partitioning with a dynamic mesh design. In particular, we build a communication optimizer, which eliminates the redundant communication for short sequences by data-aware sharding and dynamic communication, and further compresses the communication cost for long sequences by selective offloading. Besides, we also develop a balance scheduler to mitigate the imbalanced computation by parallelism-aware data assignment. We evaluate ByteScale with the model sizes ranging from 7B to 141B, context lengths from 256K to 2048K, on a production cluster with more than 12,000 GPUs. Experiment results show that ByteScale outperforms the state-of-the-art training system by up to 7.89x.

  • 9 authors
·
Feb 28, 2025

FLAME: Frozen Large Language Models Enable Data-Efficient Language-Image Pre-training

Language-image pre-training faces significant challenges due to limited data in specific formats and the constrained capacities of text encoders. While prevailing methods attempt to address these issues through data augmentation and architecture modifications, they continue to struggle with processing long-form text inputs, and the inherent limitations of traditional CLIP text encoders lead to suboptimal downstream generalization. In this paper, we propose FLAME (Frozen Large lAnguage Models Enable data-efficient language-image pre-training) that leverages frozen large language models as text encoders, naturally processing long text inputs and demonstrating impressive multilingual generalization. FLAME comprises two key components: 1) a multifaceted prompt distillation technique for extracting diverse semantic representations from long captions, which better aligns with the multifaceted nature of images, and 2) a facet-decoupled attention mechanism, complemented by an offline embedding strategy, to ensure efficient computation. Extensive empirical evaluations demonstrate FLAME's superior performance. When trained on CC3M, FLAME surpasses the previous state-of-the-art by 4.9\% in ImageNet top-1 accuracy. On YFCC15M, FLAME surpasses the WIT-400M-trained CLIP by 44.4\% in average image-to-text recall@1 across 36 languages, and by 34.6\% in text-to-image recall@1 for long-context retrieval on Urban-1k. Code is available at https://github.com/MIV-XJTU/FLAME.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 18, 2024

Qwen2.5-1M Technical Report

We introduce Qwen2.5-1M, a series of models that extend the context length to 1 million tokens. Compared to the previous 128K version, the Qwen2.5-1M series have significantly enhanced long-context capabilities through long-context pre-training and post-training. Key techniques such as long data synthesis, progressive pre-training, and multi-stage supervised fine-tuning are employed to effectively enhance long-context performance while reducing training costs. To promote the use of long-context models among a broader user base, we present and open-source our inference framework. This framework includes a length extrapolation method that can expand the model context lengths by at least four times, or even more, without additional training. To reduce inference costs, we implement a sparse attention method along with chunked prefill optimization for deployment scenarios and a sparsity refinement method to improve precision. Additionally, we detail our optimizations in the inference engine, including kernel optimization, pipeline parallelism, and scheduling optimization, which significantly enhance overall inference performance. By leveraging our inference framework, the Qwen2.5-1M models achieve a remarkable 3x to 7x prefill speedup in scenarios with 1 million tokens of context. This framework provides an efficient and powerful solution for developing applications that require long-context processing using open-source models. The Qwen2.5-1M series currently includes the open-source models Qwen2.5-7B-Instruct-1M and Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct-1M, as well as the API-accessed model Qwen2.5-Turbo. Evaluations show that Qwen2.5-1M models have been greatly improved in long-context tasks without compromising performance in short-context scenarios. Specifically, the Qwen2.5-14B-Instruct-1M model significantly outperforms GPT-4o-mini in long-context tasks and supports contexts eight times longer.

  • 28 authors
·
Jan 25, 2025 4

Oryx MLLM: On-Demand Spatial-Temporal Understanding at Arbitrary Resolution

Visual data comes in various forms, ranging from small icons of just a few pixels to long videos spanning hours. Existing multi-modal LLMs usually standardize these diverse visual inputs to a fixed resolution for visual encoders and yield similar numbers of tokens for LLMs. This approach is non-optimal for multimodal understanding and inefficient for processing inputs with long and short visual contents. To solve the problem, we propose Oryx, a unified multimodal architecture for the spatial-temporal understanding of images, videos, and multi-view 3D scenes. Oryx offers an on-demand solution to seamlessly and efficiently process visual inputs with arbitrary spatial sizes and temporal lengths through two core innovations: 1) a pre-trained OryxViT model that can encode images at any resolution into LLM-friendly visual representations; 2) a dynamic compressor module that supports 1x to 16x compression on visual tokens by request. These design features enable Oryx to accommodate extremely long visual contexts, such as videos, with lower resolution and high compression while maintaining high recognition precision for tasks like document understanding with native resolution and no compression. Beyond the architectural improvements, enhanced data curation and specialized training on long-context retrieval and spatial-aware data help Oryx achieve strong capabilities in image, video, and 3D multimodal understanding simultaneously. Our work is open-sourced at https://github.com/Oryx-mllm/Oryx.

  • 6 authors
·
Sep 19, 2024 2

Language Modeling with Learned Meta-Tokens

While modern Transformer-based language models (LMs) have achieved major success in multi-task generalization, they often struggle to capture long-range dependencies within their context window. This work introduces a novel approach using meta-tokens, special tokens injected during pre-training, along with a dedicated meta-attention mechanism to guide LMs to use these tokens. We pre-train a language model with a modified GPT-2 architecture equipped with meta-attention in addition to causal multi-head attention, and study the impact of these tokens on a suite of synthetic tasks. We find that data-efficient language model pre-training on fewer than 100B tokens utilizing meta-tokens and our meta-attention mechanism achieves strong performance on these tasks after fine-tuning. We suggest that these gains arise due to the meta-tokens sharpening the positional encoding. This enables them to operate as trainable, content-based landmarks, implicitly compressing preceding context and "caching" it in the meta-token. At inference-time, the meta-token points to relevant context, facilitating length generalization up to 2times its context window, even after extension with YaRN. We provide further evidence of these behaviors by visualizing model internals to study the residual stream, and assessing the compression quality by information-theoretic analysis on the rate-distortion tradeoff. Our findings suggest that pre-training LMs with meta-tokens offers a simple, data-efficient method to enhance long-context language modeling performance, while introducing new insights into the nature of their behavior towards length generalization.

  • 4 authors
·
Sep 18, 2025

Reinforcement Learning Foundations for Deep Research Systems: A Survey

Deep research systems, agentic AI that solve complex, multi-step tasks by coordinating reasoning, search across the open web and user files, and tool use, are moving toward hierarchical deployments with a Planner, Coordinator, and Executors. In practice, training entire stacks end-to-end remains impractical, so most work trains a single planner connected to core tools such as search, browsing, and code. While SFT imparts protocol fidelity, it suffers from imitation and exposure biases and underuses environment feedback. Preference alignment methods such as DPO are schema and proxy-dependent, off-policy, and weak for long-horizon credit assignment and multi-objective trade-offs. A further limitation of SFT and DPO is their reliance on human defined decision points and subskills through schema design and labeled comparisons. Reinforcement learning aligns with closed-loop, tool-interaction research by optimizing trajectory-level policies, enabling exploration, recovery behaviors, and principled credit assignment, and it reduces dependence on such human priors and rater biases. This survey is, to our knowledge, the first dedicated to the RL foundations of deep research systems. It systematizes work after DeepSeek-R1 along three axes: (i) data synthesis and curation; (ii) RL methods for agentic research covering stability, sample efficiency, long context handling, reward and credit design, multi-objective optimization, and multimodal integration; and (iii) agentic RL training systems and frameworks. We also cover agent architecture and coordination, as well as evaluation and benchmarks, including recent QA, VQA, long-form synthesis, and domain-grounded, tool-interaction tasks. We distill recurring patterns, surface infrastructure bottlenecks, and offer practical guidance for training robust, transparent deep research agents with RL.

  • 11 authors
·
Sep 8, 2025 2

Long-VITA: Scaling Large Multi-modal Models to 1 Million Tokens with Leading Short-Context Accuracy

We introduce Long-VITA, a simple yet effective large multi-modal model for long-context visual-language understanding tasks. It is adept at concurrently processing and analyzing modalities of image, video, and text over 4K frames or 1M tokens while delivering advanced performances on short-context multi-modal tasks. We propose an effective multi-modal training schema that starts with large language models and proceeds through vision-language alignment, general knowledge learning, and two sequential stages of long-sequence fine-tuning. We further implement context-parallelism distributed inference and logits-masked language modeling head to scale Long-VITA to infinitely long inputs of images and texts during model inference. Regarding training data, Long-VITA is built on a mix of 17M samples from public datasets only and demonstrates the state-of-the-art performance on various multi-modal benchmarks, compared against recent cutting-edge models with internal data. Long-VITA is fully reproducible and supports both NPU and GPU platforms for training and testing. By leveraging our inference designs, Long-VITA models achieve a remarkable 2x prefill speedup and 4x context length extension in single node with 8 GPUs. We hope Long-VITA can serve as a competitive baseline and offer valuable insights for the open-source community in advancing long-context multi-modal understanding.

  • 16 authors
·
Feb 7, 2025

TiRex: Zero-Shot Forecasting Across Long and Short Horizons with Enhanced In-Context Learning

In-context learning, the ability of large language models to perform tasks using only examples provided in the prompt, has recently been adapted for time series forecasting. This paradigm enables zero-shot prediction, where past values serve as context for forecasting future values, making powerful forecasting tools accessible to non-experts and increasing the performance when training data are scarce. Most existing zero-shot forecasting approaches rely on transformer architectures, which, despite their success in language, often fall short of expectations in time series forecasting, where recurrent models like LSTMs frequently have the edge. Conversely, while LSTMs are well-suited for time series modeling due to their state-tracking capabilities, they lack strong in-context learning abilities. We introduce TiRex that closes this gap by leveraging xLSTM, an enhanced LSTM with competitive in-context learning skills. Unlike transformers, state-space models, or parallelizable RNNs such as RWKV, TiRex retains state-tracking, a critical property for long-horizon forecasting. To further facilitate its state-tracking ability, we propose a training-time masking strategy called CPM. TiRex sets a new state of the art in zero-shot time series forecasting on the HuggingFace benchmarks GiftEval and Chronos-ZS, outperforming significantly larger models including TabPFN-TS (Prior Labs), Chronos Bolt (Amazon), TimesFM (Google), and Moirai (Salesforce) across both short- and long-term forecasts.

  • 6 authors
·
May 29, 2025

In-Context Meta LoRA Generation

Low-rank Adaptation (LoRA) has demonstrated remarkable capabilities for task specific fine-tuning. However, in scenarios that involve multiple tasks, training a separate LoRA model for each one results in considerable inefficiency in terms of storage and inference. Moreover, existing parameter generation methods fail to capture the correlations among these tasks, making multi-task LoRA parameter generation challenging. To address these limitations, we propose In-Context Meta LoRA (ICM-LoRA), a novel approach that efficiently achieves task-specific customization of large language models (LLMs). Specifically, we use training data from all tasks to train a tailored generator, Conditional Variational Autoencoder (CVAE). CVAE takes task descriptions as inputs and produces task-aware LoRA weights as outputs. These LoRA weights are then merged with LLMs to create task-specialized models without the need for additional fine-tuning. Furthermore, we utilize in-context meta-learning for knowledge enhancement and task mapping, to capture the relationship between tasks and parameter distributions. As a result, our method achieves more accurate LoRA parameter generation for diverse tasks using CVAE. ICM-LoRA enables more accurate LoRA parameter reconstruction than current parameter reconstruction methods and is useful for implementing task-specific enhancements of LoRA parameters. At the same time, our method occupies 283MB, only 1\% storage compared with the original LoRA.

  • 15 authors
·
Jan 29, 2025

Efficient In-Context Learning in Vision-Language Models for Egocentric Videos

Recent advancements in text-only large language models (LLMs) have highlighted the benefit of in-context learning for adapting to new tasks with a few demonstrations. However, extending in-context learning to large vision-language models (VLMs) using a huge amount of naturalistic vision-language data has shown limited success, particularly for egocentric videos, due to high data collection costs. We propose a novel training method Efficient In-context Learning on Egocentric Videos (EILEV), which elicits in-context learning in VLMs for egocentric videos without requiring massive, naturalistic egocentric video datasets. EILEV involves architectural and training data adaptations to allow the model to process contexts interleaved with video clips and narrations, sampling of in-context examples with clusters of similar verbs and nouns, use of data with skewed marginal distributions with a long tail of infrequent verbs and nouns, as well as homonyms and synonyms. Our evaluations show that EILEV-trained models outperform larger VLMs trained on a huge amount of naturalistic data in in-context learning. Furthermore, they can generalize to not only out-of-distribution, but also novel, rare egocentric videos and texts via in-context learning, demonstrating potential for applications requiring cost-effective training, and rapid post-deployment adaptability. Our code and demo are available at https://github.com/yukw777/EILEV.

  • 4 authors
·
Nov 28, 2023

Voyager: Long-Range and World-Consistent Video Diffusion for Explorable 3D Scene Generation

Real-world applications like video gaming and virtual reality often demand the ability to model 3D scenes that users can explore along custom camera trajectories. While significant progress has been made in generating 3D objects from text or images, creating long-range, 3D-consistent, explorable 3D scenes remains a complex and challenging problem. In this work, we present Voyager, a novel video diffusion framework that generates world-consistent 3D point-cloud sequences from a single image with user-defined camera path. Unlike existing approaches, Voyager achieves end-to-end scene generation and reconstruction with inherent consistency across frames, eliminating the need for 3D reconstruction pipelines (e.g., structure-from-motion or multi-view stereo). Our method integrates three key components: 1) World-Consistent Video Diffusion: A unified architecture that jointly generates aligned RGB and depth video sequences, conditioned on existing world observation to ensure global coherence 2) Long-Range World Exploration: An efficient world cache with point culling and an auto-regressive inference with smooth video sampling for iterative scene extension with context-aware consistency, and 3) Scalable Data Engine: A video reconstruction pipeline that automates camera pose estimation and metric depth prediction for arbitrary videos, enabling large-scale, diverse training data curation without manual 3D annotations. Collectively, these designs result in a clear improvement over existing methods in visual quality and geometric accuracy, with versatile applications.

  • 11 authors
·
Jun 4, 2025 2

Unseen-Codebases-Domain Data Synthesis and Training Based on Code Graphs

In the context of newly release software frameworks, large language models (LLMs) often exhibit poor performance and a high rate of hallucination, as they are not exposed to such environments during training. Although inference-time augmentation techniques such as retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can partially mitigate hallucinations, knowledge injection through prompting alone is insufficient to enable models to fully understand the intrinsic relationships among different components of a codebase, or to reason about the correct compositions and apply. Although explicit knowledge injection can be achieved through post-training, compared with public code domains, unseen codebases typically provide only source code and lack large volumes of high-quality, usage-oriented code that can be directly leveraged as training data. Consequently, existing data synthesis approaches are insufficient to adequately capture unseen codebases usage scenarios when restricted to source code alone. To address these challenges, we propose UCD-Training, a two-stage training framework for reasoning-aware data synthesis grounded in a code graph constructed from unseen codebases. UCD-Training first parses the source code to build a code graph, then conducts dependency-preserving continued pretraining (CPT) using file-level dependency data, followed by graph-grounded supervised fine-tuning (SFT) on three types of synthesized data augmented with explicit reasoning traces: (1) single-hop relation reasoning data, (2) compositional API reasoning data, and (3) codebase utilization data. We further introduce a new benchmark, UnseenCodeBench, for code generation on unseen codebases and conduct comprehensive experiments across multiple codebases.

  • 12 authors
·
Feb 23

When Does Metadata Conditioning (NOT) Work for Language Model Pre-Training? A Study with Context-Free Grammars

The ability to acquire latent semantics is one of the key properties that determines the performance of language models. One convenient approach to invoke this ability is to prepend metadata (e.g. URLs, domains, and styles) at the beginning of texts in the pre-training data, making it easier for the model to access latent semantics before observing the entire text. Previous studies have reported that this technique actually improves the performance of trained models in downstream tasks; however, this improvement has been observed only in specific downstream tasks, without consistent enhancement in average next-token prediction loss. To understand this phenomenon, we closely investigate how prepending metadata during pre-training affects model performance by examining its behavior using artificial data. Interestingly, we found that this approach produces both positive and negative effects on the downstream tasks. We demonstrate that the effectiveness of the approach depends on whether latent semantics can be inferred from the downstream task's prompt. Specifically, through investigations using data generated by probabilistic context-free grammars, we show that training with metadata helps improve model's performance when the given context is long enough to infer the latent semantics. In contrast, the technique negatively impacts performance when the context lacks the necessary information to make an accurate posterior inference.

  • 10 authors
·
Apr 24, 2025

DualKV: Shared-Prompt Flash Attention for Efficient RL Training with Large Rollouts and Long Contexts

Modern RL post-training methods such as GRPO and DAPO train on N response sequences of R tokens sampled from a shared prompt of P tokens, but standard FlashAttention replicates all P prompt tokens N times across both forward and backward passes -- duplicating compute and memory on identical hidden states. In large-rollout, long-context RL training (N{geq}16, P{geq}8K), this redundancy dominates the policy update cost. We observe that in decoder-only models, causal masking makes prompt representations invariant across sequences at every layer, so all per-token operations (norms, projections, MLP) and attention can process the prompt once -- a property not yet exploited at the kernel level for training. We propose DualKV, the first FlashAttention kernel variant that eliminates shared-prompt replication during RL training, via (1)~fused CUDA forward and backward kernels that iterate over two disjoint KV regions -- shared context and per-sequence response -- in a single kernel launch, and (2)~a data-pipeline redesign in veRL that repacks N(P{+}R) tokens into P{+}NR tokens per micro-batch, extending the token reduction from attention to the entire model by a factor ρ= N(P{+}R)/(P{+}NR). DualKV is mathematically equivalent to standard attention and introduces no approximation. On Qwen3-8B GRPO training with 8timesH100 GPUs (N{=}32, 8K-context), DualKV achieves 1.63--2.09times policy-update speedup, enables 2times larger micro-batches, and raises MFU from 36% to 76%. Similar gains hold for DAPO (2.47times speedup, 77% MFU). At 30B MoE scale on 16timesH100, DualKV achieves 3.82times policy-update and 3.38times end-to-end step speedup over FlashAttention (which requires 4-way Ulysses sequence parallelism to avoid OOM).

  • 5 authors
·
May 26 1

ISCSLP 2026 CoT-TTS Challenge: Chain-of-Thought Reasoning for Context-Aware Text-to-Speech

Recent advances in text-to-speech (TTS) have greatly improved speech naturalness, speaker similarity, and controllability. However, most existing controllable TTS systems still rely on explicit user-provided style prompts, making it difficult to automatically determine how a sentence should be spoken in long and complex conversational scenarios. This proposal introduces the ISCSLP 2026 CoT-TTS Challenge, which aims to evaluate whether a system can infer the intended speaking manner from contextual information and generate speech consistent with both the reasoning output and the surrounding scene. The challenge contains two tracks: text-context-aware CoT-TTS and audio-context-aware CoT-TTS. We construct a large-scale bilingual training set from speech-rich media and provide carefully filtered evaluation data for leaderboard comparison. Each system is required to output both a chain-of-thought reasoning analysis and the generated speech waveform. The official evaluation combines objective metrics, multimodal LLM-based evaluation, and human subjective assessment. To facilitate reproducibility, we provide inference code together with a fine-tuning recipe for a 0.6B Qwen3-based model trained via a three-stage strategy. This challenge is expected to support research on context understanding, chain-of-thought reasoning, and expressive speech generation for applications such as film dubbing, audiobook production, virtual characters, and spoken dialogue agents. Further information about the associated challenge is available at:https://iscslp2026-cot-tts.github.io/challenge-website/

  • 12 authors
·
Jun 19

Region-Constraint In-Context Generation for Instructional Video Editing

The In-context generation paradigm recently has demonstrated strong power in instructional image editing with both data efficiency and synthesis quality. Nevertheless, shaping such in-context learning for instruction-based video editing is not trivial. Without specifying editing regions, the results can suffer from the problem of inaccurate editing regions and the token interference between editing and non-editing areas during denoising. To address these, we present ReCo, a new instructional video editing paradigm that novelly delves into constraint modeling between editing and non-editing regions during in-context generation. Technically, ReCo width-wise concatenates source and target video for joint denoising. To calibrate video diffusion learning, ReCo capitalizes on two regularization terms, i.e., latent and attention regularization, conducting on one-step backward denoised latents and attention maps, respectively. The former increases the latent discrepancy of the editing region between source and target videos while reducing that of non-editing areas, emphasizing the modification on editing area and alleviating outside unexpected content generation. The latter suppresses the attention of tokens in the editing region to the tokens in counterpart of the source video, thereby mitigating their interference during novel object generation in target video. Furthermore, we propose a large-scale, high-quality video editing dataset, i.e., ReCo-Data, comprising 500K instruction-video pairs to benefit model training. Extensive experiments conducted on four major instruction-based video editing tasks demonstrate the superiority of our proposal.

OPSD-V: On-Policy Self-Distillation for Post-Training Few-Step Autoregressive Video Generators

We propose OPSD-V, an on-policy self-distillation paradigm for post-training few-step autoregressive (AR) video diffusion models. Existing few-step AR video generators can produce long videos with low latency, but still suffer from error accumulation and weakened motion dynamics during long autoregressive rollout. OPSD-V reduces long-horizon degradation while preserving the original few-step inference path. The key idea is to introduce real long-video data as temporal context during training and use it to provide dense trajectory-level supervision. Specifically, the student follows the exact inference-time rollout, generating each chunk conditioned on its own previously generated KV cache. In parallel, the teacher is evaluated at the same student-visited denoising states, but uses a cleaner AR-consistent temporal cache in which older history can be replaced by real-video context. This provides dense denoising-level corrective targets under on-policy AR cache dynamics, without changing the sampler, number of denoising steps, or inference-time cache mechanism. We apply OPSD-V to representative few-step AR video models, including Self-Forcing and LongLive. Experiments show consistent improvements in visual quality, motion dynamics, and VBenchLong scores. A user study with 10 participants comparing 20 video pairs shows that OPSD-V is preferred over the base models in 66.0% of overall-preference judgments (82.5% excluding ties).

MeiGen-AI MeiGen-AI
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Jul 8 3

BOLT: Bootstrap Long Chain-of-Thought in Language Models without Distillation

Large language models (LLMs), such as o1 from OpenAI, have demonstrated remarkable reasoning capabilities. o1 generates a long chain-of-thought (LongCoT) before answering a question. LongCoT allows LLMs to analyze problems, devise plans, reflect, and backtrack effectively. These actions empower LLM to solve complex problems. After the release of o1, many teams have attempted to replicate its LongCoT and reasoning capabilities. In terms of methods, they primarily rely on knowledge distillation with data from existing models with LongCoT capacities (e.g., OpenAI-o1, Qwen-QwQ, DeepSeek-R1-Preview), leaving significant uncertainties on systematically developing such reasoning abilities. In terms of data domains, these works focus narrowly on math while a few others include coding, limiting their generalizability. This paper introduces a novel approach to enable LLM's LongCoT capacity without distillation from o1-like models or expensive human annotations, where we bootstrap LongCoT (BOLT) from a standard instruct model. BOLT involves three stages: 1) LongCoT data bootstrapping with in-context learning on a standard instruct model; 2) LongCoT supervised finetuning; 3) online training to further refine LongCoT capacities. In BOLT, only a few in-context examples need to be constructed during the bootstrapping stage; in our experiments, we created 10 examples, demonstrating the feasibility of this approach. We use Llama-3.1-70B-Instruct to bootstrap LongCoT and apply our method to various model scales (7B, 8B, 70B). We achieve impressive performance on a variety of benchmarks, Arena-Hard, MT-Bench, WildBench, ZebraLogic, MATH500, which evaluate diverse task-solving and reasoning capabilities.

  • 6 authors
·
Feb 6, 2025 2

Genie: Show Me the Data for Quantization

Zero-shot quantization is a promising approach for developing lightweight deep neural networks when data is inaccessible owing to various reasons, including cost and issues related to privacy. By exploiting the learned parameters (mu and sigma) of batch normalization layers in an FP32-pre-trained model, zero-shot quantization schemes focus on generating synthetic data. Subsequently, they distill knowledge from the pre-trained model (teacher) to the quantized model (student) such that the quantized model can be optimized with the synthetic dataset. However, thus far, zero-shot quantization has primarily been discussed in the context of quantization-aware training methods, which require task-specific losses and long-term optimization as much as retraining. We thus introduce a post-training quantization scheme for zero-shot quantization that produces high-quality quantized networks within a few hours. Furthermore, we propose a framework called Genie~that generates data suited for quantization. With the data synthesized by Genie, we can produce robust quantized models without real datasets, which is comparable to few-shot quantization. We also propose a post-training quantization algorithm to enhance the performance of quantized models. By combining them, we can bridge the gap between zero-shot and few-shot quantization while significantly improving the quantization performance compared to that of existing approaches. In other words, we can obtain a unique state-of-the-art zero-shot quantization approach. The code is available at https://github.com/SamsungLabs/Genie.

  • 3 authors
·
Dec 9, 2022

Comparative Validation of Machine Learning Algorithms for Surgical Workflow and Skill Analysis with the HeiChole Benchmark

PURPOSE: Surgical workflow and skill analysis are key technologies for the next generation of cognitive surgical assistance systems. These systems could increase the safety of the operation through context-sensitive warnings and semi-autonomous robotic assistance or improve training of surgeons via data-driven feedback. In surgical workflow analysis up to 91% average precision has been reported for phase recognition on an open data single-center dataset. In this work we investigated the generalizability of phase recognition algorithms in a multi-center setting including more difficult recognition tasks such as surgical action and surgical skill. METHODS: To achieve this goal, a dataset with 33 laparoscopic cholecystectomy videos from three surgical centers with a total operation time of 22 hours was created. Labels included annotation of seven surgical phases with 250 phase transitions, 5514 occurences of four surgical actions, 6980 occurences of 21 surgical instruments from seven instrument categories and 495 skill classifications in five skill dimensions. The dataset was used in the 2019 Endoscopic Vision challenge, sub-challenge for surgical workflow and skill analysis. Here, 12 teams submitted their machine learning algorithms for recognition of phase, action, instrument and/or skill assessment. RESULTS: F1-scores were achieved for phase recognition between 23.9% and 67.7% (n=9 teams), for instrument presence detection between 38.5% and 63.8% (n=8 teams), but for action recognition only between 21.8% and 23.3% (n=5 teams). The average absolute error for skill assessment was 0.78 (n=1 team). CONCLUSION: Surgical workflow and skill analysis are promising technologies to support the surgical team, but are not solved yet, as shown by our comparison of algorithms. This novel benchmark can be used for comparable evaluation and validation of future work.

  • 41 authors
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Sep 29, 2021

Benchmarking and Building Long-Context Retrieval Models with LoCo and M2-BERT

Retrieval pipelines-an integral component of many machine learning systems-perform poorly in domains where documents are long (e.g., 10K tokens or more) and where identifying the relevant document requires synthesizing information across the entire text. Developing long-context retrieval encoders suitable for these domains raises three challenges: (1) how to evaluate long-context retrieval performance, (2) how to pretrain a base language model to represent both short contexts (corresponding to queries) and long contexts (corresponding to documents), and (3) how to fine-tune this model for retrieval under the batch size limitations imposed by GPU memory constraints. To address these challenges, we first introduce LoCoV1, a novel 12 task benchmark constructed to measure long-context retrieval where chunking is not possible or not effective. We next present the M2-BERT retrieval encoder, an 80M parameter state-space encoder model built from the Monarch Mixer architecture, capable of scaling to documents up to 32K tokens long. We describe a pretraining data mixture which allows this encoder to process both short and long context sequences, and a finetuning approach that adapts this base model to retrieval with only single-sample batches. Finally, we validate the M2-BERT retrieval encoder on LoCoV1, finding that it outperforms competitive Transformer-based models by at least 23.3 points, despite containing upwards of 90x fewer parameters.

  • 5 authors
·
Feb 12, 2024

LoongRL:Reinforcement Learning for Advanced Reasoning over Long Contexts

Reasoning over long contexts is essential for large language models. While reinforcement learning (RL) enhances short-context reasoning by inducing "Aha" moments in chain-of-thought, the advanced thinking patterns required for long-context reasoning remain largely unexplored, and high-difficulty RL data are scarce. In this paper, we introduce LoongRL, a data-driven RL method for advanced long-context reasoning. Central to LoongRL is KeyChain, a synthesis approach that transforms short multi-hop QA into high-difficulty long-context tasks by inserting UUID chains that hide the true question among large collections of distracting documents. Solving these tasks requires the model to trace the correct chain step-by-step, identify the true question, retrieve relevant facts and reason over them to answer correctly. RL training on KeyChain data induces an emergent plan-retrieve-reason-recheck reasoning pattern that generalizes far beyond training length. Models trained at 16K effectively solve 128K tasks without prohibitive full-length RL rollout costs. On Qwen2.5-7B and 14B, LoongRL substantially improves long-context multi-hop QA accuracy by +23.5% and +21.1% absolute gains. The resulting LoongRL-14B reaches a score of 74.2, rivaling much larger frontier models such as o3-mini (74.5) and DeepSeek-R1 (74.9). It also improves long-context retrieval, passes all 128K needle-in-a-haystack stress tests, and preserves short-context reasoning capabilities.

MicrosoftResearch Microsoft Research
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Oct 22, 2025 5

Re$^3$Dial: Retrieve, Reorganize and Rescale Dialogue Corpus for Long-Turn Open-Domain Dialogue Pre-training

Large-scale open-domain dialogue data crawled from public social media has greatly improved the performance of dialogue models. However, long-turn dialogues are still highly scarce. Specifically, most dialogue sessions in existing corpora have less than three turns. To alleviate this issue, we propose the Retrieve, Reorganize and Rescale framework (Re^3Dial), which can automatically construct a billion-scale long-turn dialogue corpus from existing short-turn dialogue data. Re^3Dial first trains an Unsupervised Dense Session Retriever (UDSR) to capture semantic and discourse relationships within multi-turn dialogues for retrieving relevant and coherent sessions. It then reorganizes the short-turn dialogues into long-turn sessions via recursively retrieving and selecting the consecutive sessions with our proposed diversity sampling strategy. Extensive evaluations on multiple multi-turn dialogue benchmarks demonstrate that Re^3Dial consistently and significantly improves the dialogue model's ability to utilize long-term context for modeling multi-turn dialogues across different pre-training settings. Finally, we build a toolkit for efficiently rescaling dialogue corpus with Re^3Dial, which enables us to construct a corpus containing 1B Chinese dialogue sessions with 11.3 turns on average (5X longer than the original EVA corpus). We will release our UDSR model, toolkit, and data for public use.

  • 3 authors
·
May 4, 2023

A Comprehensive Survey on Long Context Language Modeling

Efficient processing of long contexts has been a persistent pursuit in Natural Language Processing. With the growing number of long documents, dialogues, and other textual data, it is important to develop Long Context Language Models (LCLMs) that can process and analyze extensive inputs in an effective and efficient way. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on recent advances in long-context modeling for large language models. Our survey is structured around three key aspects: how to obtain effective and efficient LCLMs, how to train and deploy LCLMs efficiently, and how to evaluate and analyze LCLMs comprehensively. For the first aspect, we discuss data strategies, architectural designs, and workflow approaches oriented with long context processing. For the second aspect, we provide a detailed examination of the infrastructure required for LCLM training and inference. For the third aspect, we present evaluation paradigms for long-context comprehension and long-form generation, as well as behavioral analysis and mechanism interpretability of LCLMs. Beyond these three key aspects, we thoroughly explore the diverse application scenarios where existing LCLMs have been deployed and outline promising future development directions. This survey provides an up-to-date review of the literature on long-context LLMs, which we wish to serve as a valuable resource for both researchers and engineers. An associated GitHub repository collecting the latest papers and repos is available at: https://github.com/LCLM-Horizon/A-Comprehensive-Survey-For-Long-Context-Language-Modeling{\color[RGB]{175,36,67}{LCLM-Horizon}}.

  • 37 authors
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Mar 20, 2025 2

COSMO: COntrastive Streamlined MultimOdal Model with Interleaved Pre-Training

In the evolution of Vision-Language Pre-training, shifting from short-text comprehension to encompassing extended textual contexts is pivotal. Recent autoregressive vision-language models like flamingo, palme, leveraging the long-context capability of Large Language Models, have excelled in few-shot text generation tasks but face challenges in alignment tasks. Addressing this gap, we introduce the contrastive loss into text generation models, presenting the COntrastive-Streamlined MultimOdal framework (\ModelName), strategically partitioning the language model into dedicated unimodal text processing and adept multimodal data handling components. \ModelName, our unified framework, merges unimodal and multimodal elements, enhancing model performance for tasks involving textual and visual data while notably reducing learnable parameters. However, these models demand extensive long-text datasets, yet the availability of high-quality long-text video datasets remains limited. To bridge this gap, this work introduces \VideoDatasetName, an inaugural interleaved video-text dataset featuring comprehensive captions, marking a significant step forward. Demonstrating its impact, we illustrate how enhances model performance in image-text tasks. With 34% learnable parameters and utilizing 72\% of the available data, our model demonstrates significant superiority over OpenFlamingo~openflamingo. For instance, in the 4-shot flickr captioning task, performance notably improves from 57.2% to 65.\%. The contributions of and are underscored by notable performance gains across 14 diverse downstream datasets encompassing both image-text and video-text tasks.

  • 8 authors
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Jan 1, 2024 2

Needle Threading: Can LLMs Follow Threads through Near-Million-Scale Haystacks?

As the context limits of Large Language Models (LLMs) increase, the range of possible applications and downstream functions broadens. In many real-world tasks, decisions depend on details scattered across collections of often disparate documents containing mostly irrelevant information. Long-context LLMs appear well-suited to this form of complex information retrieval and reasoning, which has traditionally proven costly and time-consuming. However, although the development of longer context models has seen rapid gains in recent years, our understanding of how effectively LLMs use their context has not kept pace. To address this, we conduct a set of retrieval experiments designed to evaluate the capabilities of 17 leading LLMs, such as their ability to follow threads of information through the context window. Strikingly, we find that many models are remarkably threadsafe: capable of simultaneously following multiple threads without significant loss in performance. Still, for many models, we find the effective context limit is significantly shorter than the supported context length, with accuracy decreasing as the context window grows. Our study also highlights the important point that token counts from different tokenizers should not be directly compared -- they often correspond to substantially different numbers of written characters. We release our code and long-context experimental data.

  • 3 authors
·
Nov 7, 2024 3

L-Eval: Instituting Standardized Evaluation for Long Context Language Models

Recently, there has been growing interest in extending the context length of instruction-following models in order to effectively process single-turn long input (e.g. summarizing a paper) and conversations with more extensive histories. While proprietary models such as GPT-4 and Claude have demonstrated considerable advancements in handling tens of thousands of tokens of context, open-sourced models are still in the early stages of experimentation. It also remains unclear whether developing these long context models can offer substantial gains on practical downstream tasks over retrieval-based methods or models simply trained on chunked contexts. To address this challenge, we propose to institute standardized evaluation for long context language models. Concretely, we develop L-Eval which contains 411 long documents and over 2,000 query-response pairs manually annotated and checked by the authors encompassing areas such as law, finance, school lectures, lengthy conversations, news, long-form novels, and meetings. L-Eval also adopts diverse evaluation methods and instruction styles, enabling a more reliable assessment of Long Context Language Models (LCLMs). Our findings indicate that while open-source models typically lag behind their commercial counterparts, they still exhibit impressive performance. LLaMA2 achieves the best results (win 45\% vs turbo-16k) on open-ended tasks with only 4k context length and ChatGLM2 achieves the best results on closed-ended tasks with 8k input tokens. We release our new evaluation suite, code, and all generation results including predictions from all open-sourced LCLMs, GPT4-32k, Cluade-100k at {https://github.com/OpenLMLab/LEval}.

  • 7 authors
·
Jul 20, 2023

Dataset Decomposition: Faster LLM Training with Variable Sequence Length Curriculum

Large language models (LLMs) are commonly trained on datasets consisting of fixed-length token sequences. These datasets are created by randomly concatenating documents of various lengths and then chunking them into sequences of a predetermined target length. However, this method of concatenation can lead to cross-document attention within a sequence, which is neither a desirable learning signal nor computationally efficient. Additionally, training on long sequences becomes computationally prohibitive due to the quadratic cost of attention. In this study, we introduce dataset decomposition, a novel variable sequence length training technique, to tackle these challenges. We decompose a dataset into a union of buckets, each containing sequences of the same size extracted from a unique document. During training, we use variable sequence length and batch size, sampling simultaneously from all buckets with a curriculum. In contrast to the concat-and-chunk baseline, which incurs a fixed attention cost at every step of training, our proposed method incurs a penalty proportional to the actual document lengths at each step, resulting in significant savings in training time. We train an 8k context-length 1B model at the same cost as a 2k context-length model trained with the baseline approach. Experiments on a web-scale corpus demonstrate that our approach significantly enhances performance on standard language evaluations and long-context benchmarks, reaching target accuracy 3x faster compared to the baseline. Our method not only enables efficient pretraining on long sequences but also scales effectively with dataset size. Lastly, we shed light on a critical yet less studied aspect of training large language models: the distribution and curriculum of sequence lengths, which results in a non-negligible difference in performance.

  • 7 authors
·
May 21, 2024

Is It Really Long Context if All You Need Is Retrieval? Towards Genuinely Difficult Long Context NLP

Improvements in language models' capabilities have pushed their applications towards longer contexts, making long-context evaluation and development an active research area. However, many disparate use-cases are grouped together under the umbrella term of "long-context", defined simply by the total length of the model's input, including - for example - Needle-in-a-Haystack tasks, book summarization, and information aggregation. Given their varied difficulty, in this position paper we argue that conflating different tasks by their context length is unproductive. As a community, we require a more precise vocabulary to understand what makes long-context tasks similar or different. We propose to unpack the taxonomy of long-context based on the properties that make them more difficult with longer contexts. We propose two orthogonal axes of difficulty: (I) Diffusion: How hard is it to find the necessary information in the context? (II) Scope: How much necessary information is there to find? We survey the literature on long-context, provide justification for this taxonomy as an informative descriptor, and situate the literature with respect to it. We conclude that the most difficult and interesting settings, whose necessary information is very long and highly diffused within the input, is severely under-explored. By using a descriptive vocabulary and discussing the relevant properties of difficulty in long-context, we can implement more informed research in this area. We call for a careful design of tasks and benchmarks with distinctly long context, taking into account the characteristics that make it qualitatively different from shorter context.

  • 6 authors
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Jun 29, 2024 1

Selecting Influential Samples for Long Context Alignment via Homologous Models' Guidance and Contextual Awareness Measurement

The expansion of large language models to effectively handle instructions with extremely long contexts has yet to be fully investigated. The primary obstacle lies in constructing a high-quality long instruction-following dataset devised for long context alignment. Existing studies have attempted to scale up the available data volume by synthesizing long instruction-following samples. However, indiscriminately increasing the quantity of data without a well-defined strategy for ensuring data quality may introduce low-quality samples and restrict the final performance. To bridge this gap, we aim to address the unique challenge of long-context alignment, i.e., modeling the long-range dependencies for handling instructions and lengthy input contexts. We propose GATEAU, a novel framework designed to identify the influential and high-quality samples enriched with long-range dependency relations by utilizing crafted Homologous Models' Guidance (HMG) and Contextual Awareness Measurement (CAM). Specifically, HMG attempts to measure the difficulty of generating corresponding responses due to the long-range dependencies, using the perplexity scores of the response from two homologous models with different context windows. Also, the role of CAM is to measure the difficulty of understanding the long input contexts due to long-range dependencies by evaluating whether the model's attention is focused on important segments. Built upon both proposed methods, we select the most challenging samples as the influential data to effectively frame the long-range dependencies, thereby achieving better performance of LLMs. Comprehensive experiments indicate that GATEAU effectively identifies samples enriched with long-range dependency relations and the model trained on these selected samples exhibits better instruction-following and long-context understanding capabilities.

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 21, 2024 3

In-Context Pretraining: Language Modeling Beyond Document Boundaries

Large language models (LMs) are currently trained to predict tokens given document prefixes, enabling them to directly perform long-form generation and prompting-style tasks which can be reduced to document completion. Existing pretraining pipelines train LMs by concatenating random sets of short documents to create input contexts but the prior documents provide no signal for predicting the next document. We instead present In-Context Pretraining, a new approach where language models are pretrained on a sequence of related documents, thereby explicitly encouraging them to read and reason across document boundaries. We can do In-Context Pretraining by simply changing the document ordering so that each context contains related documents, and directly applying existing pretraining pipelines. However, this document sorting problem is challenging. There are billions of documents and we would like the sort to maximize contextual similarity for every document without repeating any data. To do this, we introduce approximate algorithms for finding related documents with efficient nearest neighbor search and constructing coherent input contexts with a graph traversal algorithm. Our experiments show In-Context Pretraining offers a simple and scalable approach to significantly enhance LMs'performance: we see notable improvements in tasks that require more complex contextual reasoning, including in-context learning (+8%), reading comprehension (+15%), faithfulness to previous contexts (+16%), long-context reasoning (+5%), and retrieval augmentation (+9%).

  • 10 authors
·
Oct 16, 2023 3