arXiv Computation and Language

EnComp: Lightweight Encoder-Only Context Compression for Retrieval-Augmented Question Answering

arXiv Machine Learning
1d ago

Retrieval from Within: An Intrinsic Capability of Attention-Based Models

The paper introduces INTRA, an attention-based encoder-decoder framework that retrieves directly from its own internal representations instead of using an external retriever. By having decoder attention query pre-encoded evidence chunks, INTRA unifies retrieval and generation, eliminating the typical mismatch seen in retrieval-augmented generation pipelines. Experiments on question-answering benchmarks show that INTRA outperforms strong engineered retrieval pipelines in both evidence recall and overall answer quality.

By Elad Hoffer, Yochai Blau, Edan Kinderman, Ron Banner, Daniel Soudry, Boris Ginsburg
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 10

Retrieval-augmented Decoding for Improving Truthfulness in Open-ended Generation

The paper introduces Retrieval-Augmented Decoding (RAD), a decoding-time method that improves the truthfulness of large language models without retraining. RAD uses a small reference set of up to ten annotated examples to build a grounding space of context embeddings and next-token logits, which it retrieves and aggregates during inference to shape the model’s output. Experiments on four open-ended generation benchmarks and four different LLMs show that RAD consistently outperforms strong baselines and generalizes well across tasks.

By Manh Nguyen, Sunil Gupta, Hung Le
arXiv AI
Jun 30

MATCH: Modulating Attention via In-Context Retrieval for Long-Context Transformers

arXiv:2606. 29844v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The quadratic computational cost of traditional attention mechanisms poses a major bottleneck to the scalability and practical deployment of large language models (LLMs), particularly in long-context scenarios.

By Linrui Ma, Chun Hei Lo, Xinyu Wang, Peng Lu, Xihao Yuan, Hanting Chen, Kai Han, Xinghao Chen, Chengjun Zhan, Hanlin Xu, Yichun Yin, Lifeng Shang, Feng Wen, Boxing Chen, Yufei Cui
arXiv AI
6d ago

Highlight-Then-Summarize: Learning to Compress Evidence for Long-Context Understanding

The paper introduces Highlight-Then-Summarize (H2S), a two-step approach that first highlights question-relevant evidence in long documents and then condenses it into a compact, question-conditioned summary before generating an answer. The authors built the H2S-Dataset with 6,647 examples spanning 11 benchmark families, and developed H2S-RL to reward evidence selection and summary construction. Evaluated on the H2S-Bench suite, the H2S-14B model outperforms larger open-source models, achieving the highest overall score and maintaining strong performance even with a reduced output budget.

By Zhaoyuan Xia (Peking University, Baidu Inc), Qinghongbing Xie (Tsinghua University), Yung Xiang Hue (Tsinghua University), Jianguang Jiang (Baidu Inc), Gaofeng Lu (Baidu Inc), Zhenyu Jiao (Baidu Inc), Xing Yuan (Baidu Inc), Dai Dai (Baidu Inc), Tong Mo (Peking University), Long Zeng (Tsinghua University)
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