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Main Authors: Liang, Manlai, Huang, Wanyi, Liu, Mandi, Li, Huaijun, Li, Jinlong
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11498
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author Liang, Manlai
Huang, Wanyi
Liu, Mandi
Li, Huaijun
Li, Jinlong
author_facet Liang, Manlai
Huang, Wanyi
Liu, Mandi
Li, Huaijun
Li, Jinlong
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in natural language processing and generation, yet their ability to handle long-context input remains constrained by the quadratic complexity of attention computation and linear-increasing key-value memory footprint. To reduce computational costs and memory, key-value cache compression techniques are commonly applied at inference time, but this often leads to severe performance degradation, as models are not trained to handle compressed context. Although there are more sophisticated compression methods, they are typically unsuitable for post-training because of their incompatibility with gradient-based optimization or high computation overhead. To fill this gap with no additional parameter and little computation overhead, we propose Lag-Relative Sparse Attention(LRSA) anchored by the LagKV compression method for long context post-training. Our method performs chunk-by-chunk prefilling, which selects the top K most relevant key-value pairs in a fixed-size lagging window, allowing the model to focus on salient historical context while maintaining efficiency. Experimental results show that our approach significantly enhances the robustness of the LLM with key-value compression and achieves better fine-tuned results in the question-answer tuning task.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_11498
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Lag-Relative Sparse Attention In Long Context Training
Liang, Manlai
Huang, Wanyi
Liu, Mandi
Li, Huaijun
Li, Jinlong
Computation and Language
Large Language Models (LLMs) have made significant strides in natural language processing and generation, yet their ability to handle long-context input remains constrained by the quadratic complexity of attention computation and linear-increasing key-value memory footprint. To reduce computational costs and memory, key-value cache compression techniques are commonly applied at inference time, but this often leads to severe performance degradation, as models are not trained to handle compressed context. Although there are more sophisticated compression methods, they are typically unsuitable for post-training because of their incompatibility with gradient-based optimization or high computation overhead. To fill this gap with no additional parameter and little computation overhead, we propose Lag-Relative Sparse Attention(LRSA) anchored by the LagKV compression method for long context post-training. Our method performs chunk-by-chunk prefilling, which selects the top K most relevant key-value pairs in a fixed-size lagging window, allowing the model to focus on salient historical context while maintaining efficiency. Experimental results show that our approach significantly enhances the robustness of the LLM with key-value compression and achieves better fine-tuned results in the question-answer tuning task.
title Lag-Relative Sparse Attention In Long Context Training
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11498