SEAL: Scaling to Emphasize Attention for Long-Context Retrieval

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Lee, Changhun, Seok, Minsang, Jin, Jun-gyu, Cho, Younghyun, Park, Eunhyeok
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Lee, Changhun
Seok, Minsang
Jin, Jun-gyu
Cho, Younghyun
Park, Eunhyeok
author_facet Lee, Changhun
Seok, Minsang
Jin, Jun-gyu
Cho, Younghyun
Park, Eunhyeok
contents While many advanced LLMs are designed to handle long sequence data, we can still observe notable quality degradation even within the sequence limit. In this work, we introduce a novel approach called Scaling to Emphasize Attention for Long-context retrieval (SEAL), which enhances the retrieval performance of large language models (LLMs) over long contexts. We observe that specific attention heads are closely tied to long-context retrieval, showing positive or negative correlation with retrieval scores, and adjusting the strength of these heads boosts the quality of LLMs in long context by a large margin. Built on this insight, we propose a learning-based mechanism that leverages generated data to emphasize these heads. By applying SEAL, we achieve significant improvements in long-context retrieval performance across various tasks and models. Additionally, when combined with existing training-free context extension techniques, SEAL extends the contextual limits of LLMs while maintaining highly reliable outputs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_15225
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle SEAL: Scaling to Emphasize Attention for Long-Context Retrieval
Lee, Changhun
Seok, Minsang
Jin, Jun-gyu
Cho, Younghyun
Park, Eunhyeok
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
While many advanced LLMs are designed to handle long sequence data, we can still observe notable quality degradation even within the sequence limit. In this work, we introduce a novel approach called Scaling to Emphasize Attention for Long-context retrieval (SEAL), which enhances the retrieval performance of large language models (LLMs) over long contexts. We observe that specific attention heads are closely tied to long-context retrieval, showing positive or negative correlation with retrieval scores, and adjusting the strength of these heads boosts the quality of LLMs in long context by a large margin. Built on this insight, we propose a learning-based mechanism that leverages generated data to emphasize these heads. By applying SEAL, we achieve significant improvements in long-context retrieval performance across various tasks and models. Additionally, when combined with existing training-free context extension techniques, SEAL extends the contextual limits of LLMs while maintaining highly reliable outputs.
title SEAL: Scaling to Emphasize Attention for Long-Context Retrieval
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.15225