arXiv Machine Learning

Relevant but Incomplete: Referential Dangling as a Paradigm-Level Failure Mode in Hard Prompt Compression

arXiv:2608. 04569v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Hard prompt compression reduces long-context inference cost by independently scoring tokens, sentences, or chunks and retaining the highest-scoring units under a budget.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

EAR: Entity-Aware Partitioning Approach for Retrieval-Augmented Generation Development

The paper introduces EAR, an Entity‑Aware Partitioning approach that improves retrieval‑augmented generation for multiple‑choice question answering by extracting normalized surface anchors from questions, answers, and the corpus. EAR retrieves local windows around matching anchors and can attach a larger parent passage via an extractive summary, reducing retrieved words by 37.5‑40.2% compared to fixed‑size chunks. Experiments on a cleaned MMLU‑style subset with Mistral, Gemma, and DeepSeek show modest accuracy changes, none statistically significant, highlighting EAR’s methodological contribution of compact, inspectable retrieval units.

By Cenab Batu Bora, Oylum Alatl{\i}, Sebnem Bora, Oguz Dikenelli
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
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 AI
4d ago

CoEM: Empowering Long-Context Reasoning with Commit-on-Evidence Memory

CoEM introduces a Commit-on-Evidence Memory system that learns when to compress source evidence into compact memory facts while preserving potentially useful excerpts verbatim in a pending set. The system uses a learned policy to decide whether to promote, retain, or discard each pending excerpt as new context arrives, and a frozen verifier ensures only supported facts are committed. Reinforcement learning trains this policy with step-level evidence rewards and final answer rewards, leading to consistent improvements in long-context reasoning, achieving 10.4–11.4 F1 points over the strongest baseline on 6,400-document inputs.

By Jingguang Li, Yebo Wu, Zuyi Guo, Kailang Ma, Xianjie Dai, Han Zheng, Benwang Chen, Li Li, Can Rong, Heye Huang