arXiv Computation and Language

Compile, Don't Memorize: A Context Compilation Architecture (CCA) for In-Context Learning

arXiv AI
Jul 14

Agentic Context Learning with Self-Discovered Specification

arXiv:2607. 09794v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Context learning is an emerging inference-time task where LLMs must learn and apply novel, task-specific knowledge from intricate contexts absent from pre-training; even frontier models score under 24% task success.

By Jike Zhong, Ming Li, Yuxiang Lai, Ziyan Yang, Jingyu Xie, Jihyung Kil, Zheda Mai, Shao-Yuan Lo, Ren Xiang, Konstantinos Psounis, Yuanyuan Lei
arXiv AI
Sep 30

Context Language Models

The paper introduces Context Language Models (CLMs), which treat context as a mutable file that the model can update freely, enabling the model to learn what information to retain. CLMs built zero‑shot from existing models outperform state‑of‑the‑art context‑management methods on several benchmarks, achieving higher accuracy with fewer FLOPs. The authors also demonstrate that CLMs can be steered via natural‑language instructions and online reinforcement learning, and they propose a suffix‑cache reuse strategy that further reduces server‑side compute.

By Rulin Shao, Shannon Zejiang Shen, Junjie Oscar Yin, Yuetai Li, Minheng Wang, Hamish Ivison, Radha Poovendran, Nathan Lambert, Teng Xiao, Mike Lewis, Wen-tau Yih, Luke Zettlemoyer, Pang Wei Koh
arXiv AI
Oct 9

SFT-as-Context Mitigates Forgetting in Supervised Fine-Tuning

The paper introduces SFT-as-context, a training‑free method that lets a parent large language model (LLM) use the response of a supervised fine‑tuned (SFT) model as context to answer queries. This approach preserves the parent model’s general capabilities while acquiring the SFT model’s specialized skills, achieving performance close to the SFT model on fine‑tuned benchmarks and near the parent model on general tasks. Experiments across 19 parent‑SFT pairs and 11 benchmarks show minimal gaps in performance, and the method can solve problems requiring both specialized and general knowledge, even when neither model alone succeeds.

By Kenan Tang, Andong Hua, Chengxuan Qian, Saket Tiwari, Yao Qin
arXiv AI
Jul 8

LongCrafter: Towards Diverse Long-Context Understanding via Evidence-Graph-Guided Instruction Synthesis

arXiv:2607. 06160v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Synthesizing long-context supervised fine-tuning (SFT) data is a scalable way to enhance the long-context understanding of large language models (LLMs), yet existing approaches share three limitations: narrow task coverage, insufficient instruction difficulty, and a lack of faithfulness supervision.

By Chenhao Yuan, Yinhao Xu, Shuwen Xu, Xizhi Yang, Jiaxiang Liu, Chenxi Zhou, Shaoping Huang, Haolin Ren, Pengfei Cao, Jun Zhao, Kang Liu
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Language Models Can Control Their Own Attention

The paper introduces Declarative Attention (DA), a protocol that lets language models explicitly declare which parts of their context to focus on during generation. By partitioning decoding into full-context, region-specific, and recent-output-only modes, the inference engine can skip large portions of the KV cache, dramatically reducing attended tokens. Experiments on 15 long-context tasks with off-the-shelf models show significant savings (52.0% and 31.1% reductions) with only modest accuracy drops that diminish as model size increases.

By Namgyu Ho, Huzama Ahmad, Woosung Koh, Se-Young Yun, Tal Schuster, Cicero Nogueira dos Santos