arXiv Machine Learning

AdaMem: Adaptive Memory Token Allocation for Soft Compression in Retrieval-Augmented Generation

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 7

Compression Beyond the Uncompressed: A Two-Stage Training Recipe for Soft Context Compression in RAG

The paper introduces DEX-Comp, a two‑stage training method for soft context compression in Retrieval‑Augmented Generation (RAG). First, a pure distillation warm‑start trains the compression model on correct responses from an uncompressed RAG. Then, hard exploration uses reinforcement learning on queries where the uncompressed RAG fails, encouraging better computation patterns for compressed representations. Experiments on five open‑domain QA benchmarks show that DEX‑Comp compresses retrieved contexts 16×, speeds inference 4×–24×, and matches or surpasses the uncompressed RAG baseline across various retrieval depths.

By Shuyu Guo, Shuo Zhang, Zhaochun Ren
arXiv AI
Aug 19

DEPT: Document Embedding Preservation Tuning for Unified Query Expansion and Retrieval

The paper introduces DEPT, a method that trains a single decoder-only large language model to both expand queries and encode documents for retrieval. By preserving document embeddings close to their initial cached values while allowing gradients to flow through the generator, DEPT stabilizes retrieval targets and enables efficient index reuse and online hard‑negative mining. Experiments on the BEIR benchmark with Qwen3‑4B‑Instruct‑2507 and LLaMA‑3.2‑3B‑Instruct show that DEPT outperforms training‑free, independently trained, and staged unified baselines, with ablations confirming the benefits of preservation, whitening, end‑to‑end expansion training, and online negatives.

By Jingyuan Wang, Richong Zhang, Zhijie Nie, Mingxin Li, Yanzhao Zhang
arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

Adamas: Hadamard Sparse Attention for Efficient Long-Context Inference

Adamas is a token‑level sparse attention mechanism that uses the Hadamard transform, bucketization, and 2‑bit compression to create compact representations, followed by lightweight distance‑based top‑k selection for efficient long‑context inference. It achieves near‑lossless performance on Llama‑3.1‑8B‑Instruct and delivers up to 6.5× speedup in self‑attention and 1.7× in end‑to‑end decoding at a 32K context length. Adamas also matches full attention performance on challenging long‑form reasoning benchmarks such as AIME 2024 and 2025.

By Siyuan Yan, Guo-Qing Jiang, Yuchen Zhang, Xiaoxing Ma, Ran Zhu, Chun Cao, Jingwei Xu
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 12

Beyond the Final Embedding: Retrieving Memories from Token-Level Evidence

The paper introduces a memory-augmented retrieval method that leverages token-level evidence instead of relying solely on single-vector embeddings. By performing sparse token matching and aggregating scores with whole-memory similarity, the approach improves retrieval performance across eight benchmarks and various model families without extra training. An optional low-rank query adapter can further boost results when supervised.

By Han Luo, Zhan Zhuang, Xu He, Jujia Zhao, Yu Li, Suqin Yuan, Dong Li, Lei Feng
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

REVA: Reusable Evidence View Aggregation for Context-Efficient RAG Serving

The paper introduces REVA, a method for compressing retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) prompts by aggregating historical query–document–model interactions into reusable evidence views. REVA mines attention traces from the target generator, maps token-level attention to readable words, aggregates importance across repeated document accesses, and produces budget‑specific plain‑text views that maintain document order and the standard RAG interface. Experiments on four benchmarks with modern LLMs show that REVA improves generation quality by 1.0–5.8 points over existing compressors while reducing compression overhead by 5.3 to 15.6 times and adding less than 40 ms of latency.

By Tuan Nguyen, Qiran Hu, Banruo Liu, Khoa D. Doan, Kok-Seng Wong, Fan Lai
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

BudgetMem: Training-Free Selective Memory for Cost-Efficient Long-Context Processing in Language Models

arXiv:2511. 04919v3 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Processing long documents with large language models (LLMs) is expensive: a single query over a 100K-token document can cost from tens of cents to over a dollar in API fees, depending on the model, and memory grows linearly with context length.

By Chandra Vamsi Krishna Alla, Harish Naidu Gaddam, Manohar Kommi, Sheikh Nazib Ahmed
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 9

One Token per Multimodal Evidence: Latent Memory for Resource-Constrained QA

External memory effectively grounds large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs)-based question answering (QA) in relevant multimodal evidence. However, existing memory paradigms represent each memory item in raw text and image forms, so retrieval-based systems must pass the retrieved text or images to the generation LLMs/VLMs, resulting in high token consumption and storage pressure, making it unaffordable for resource-constrained applications.