UniGist: Towards General and Hardware-aligned Sequence-level Long Context Compression

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Deng, Chenlong, Zhang, Zhisong, Mao, Kelong, Li, Shuaiyi, Fang, Tianqing, Zhang, Hongming, Mi, Haitao, Yu, Dong, Dou, Zhicheng
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Deng, Chenlong
Zhang, Zhisong
Mao, Kelong
Li, Shuaiyi
Fang, Tianqing
Zhang, Hongming
Mi, Haitao
Yu, Dong
Dou, Zhicheng
author_facet Deng, Chenlong
Zhang, Zhisong
Mao, Kelong
Li, Shuaiyi
Fang, Tianqing
Zhang, Hongming
Mi, Haitao
Yu, Dong
Dou, Zhicheng
contents Large language models are increasingly capable of handling long-context inputs, but the memory overhead of key-value (KV) cache remains a major bottleneck for general-purpose deployment. While various compression strategies have been explored, sequence-level compression, which drops the full KV caches for certain tokens, is particularly challenging as it can lead to the loss of important contextual information. To address this, we introduce UniGist, a sequence-level long-context compression framework that efficiently preserves context information by replacing raw tokens with special compression tokens (gists) in a fine-grained manner. We adopt a chunk-free training strategy and design an efficient kernel with a gist shift trick, enabling optimized GPU training. Our scheme also supports flexible inference by allowing the actual removal of compressed tokens, resulting in real-time memory savings. Experiments across multiple long-context tasks demonstrate that UniGist significantly improves compression quality, with especially strong performance in detail-recalling tasks and long-range dependency modeling.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_15763
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle UniGist: Towards General and Hardware-aligned Sequence-level Long Context Compression
Deng, Chenlong
Zhang, Zhisong
Mao, Kelong
Li, Shuaiyi
Fang, Tianqing
Zhang, Hongming
Mi, Haitao
Yu, Dong
Dou, Zhicheng
Computation and Language
Large language models are increasingly capable of handling long-context inputs, but the memory overhead of key-value (KV) cache remains a major bottleneck for general-purpose deployment. While various compression strategies have been explored, sequence-level compression, which drops the full KV caches for certain tokens, is particularly challenging as it can lead to the loss of important contextual information. To address this, we introduce UniGist, a sequence-level long-context compression framework that efficiently preserves context information by replacing raw tokens with special compression tokens (gists) in a fine-grained manner. We adopt a chunk-free training strategy and design an efficient kernel with a gist shift trick, enabling optimized GPU training. Our scheme also supports flexible inference by allowing the actual removal of compressed tokens, resulting in real-time memory savings. Experiments across multiple long-context tasks demonstrate that UniGist significantly improves compression quality, with especially strong performance in detail-recalling tasks and long-range dependency modeling.
title UniGist: Towards General and Hardware-aligned Sequence-level Long Context Compression
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.15763