arXiv Machine Learning

Prompt Compression via Activation Aggregation

arXiv:2607. 08399v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Large language models process prompts by propagating activations through dozens of layers before generating a response.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Learning a Single Token to Replace Long System Prompts in LLMs

arXiv:2511.23271v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Long system prompts are widely used to steer Large Language Models (LLMs), but repeatedly processing them at inference time is inefficient and cons...

By Jiancheng Dong, Pengyue Jia, Jingyu Peng, Maolin Wang, Yuhao Wang, Lixin Su, Xin Sun, Shuaiqiang Wang, Dawei Yin, Xiangyu Zhao
arXiv AI
6d ago

Prompt Minimization: Reducing Input Redundancy Without Sacrificing Output Fidelity

The paper investigates prompt minimization, aiming to reduce prompts to their smallest, most information-dense form without losing output fidelity. It argues that shorter prompts lower computational overhead and inference latency, especially when large contexts are unnecessarily included, and that longer prompts can harm LLM reasoning and accuracy. The authors propose three frameworks to identify minimal prompts and show that these often produce outputs comparable to longer versions, highlighting redundancy in the input space and opening new avenues for efficient prompt engineering.

By Marius F. R. Juston, Kevin A. Karim, Jonathan Gao, Kevin C. Li, Rudhi Bashambu
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

Synthesizing Instruction-Tuning Datasets with Contrastive Decoding

The paper introduces CoDIT, a contrastive decoding technique that separates instruction-following behavior from pre-trained world knowledge in large language models. By generating responses that emphasize post-training instruction capabilities while suppressing shared pre-trained knowledge, CoDIT creates instruction-tuning datasets that lead to consistently better model performance than directly generated responses or existing public datasets. The authors also provide theoretical and empirical evidence that CoDIT effectively distills instruction-tuning knowledge from model parameters into text, facilitating cross-architecture transfer.

By Tatsuya Ichinose, Youmi Ma, Masanari Oi, Ryuto Koike, Naoaki Okazaki
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 2

PARTREP: Learning What to Repeat for Decoder-only LLMs

While decoder-only LLMs excel at a vast array of natural language tasks, it suffers from an asymmetric information flow induced by causal attention: later tokens are richer in contextual grounding than earlier ones. A simple and effective remedy is prompt repetition -- just appending a second copy of prompt before generation can redistribute grounding across positions and improve reasoning performance.

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