In plain words: Instead of storing every detail of a long text, this keeps a compact global summary plus a detailed store, and lets the question pull in the details it needs. It answered long-text questions more accurately and efficiently than keeping or compressing the whole text.
Abstract
Processing long contexts poses a significant challenge for large language models (LLMs) due to their inherent context-window limitations and the computational burden of extensive key-value (KV) activations, which severely impact efficiency. For information-seeking tasks, full context perception is often unnecessary, as a query's information needs can dynamically range from localized details to a global perspective, depending on its complexity. However, existing methods struggle to adapt effectively to these dynamic information needs. In the paper, we propose a method for processing long-context information-seeking tasks via query-guided Activation Refilling (ACRE). ACRE constructs a Bi-layer KV Cache for long contexts, where the layer-1 (L1) cache compactly captures global information, and the layer-2 (L2) cache provides detailed and localized information. ACRE establishes a proxying relationship between the two caches, allowing the input query to attend to the L1 cache and dynamically refill it with relevant entries from the L2 cache. This mechanism integrates global understanding with query-specific local details, thus improving answer decoding. Experiments on a variety of long-context information-seeking datasets demonstrate ACRE's effectiveness, achieving improvements in both performance and efficiency.
Hongjin Qian, Zheng Liu, Peitian Zhang, Zhicheng Dou, Defu Lian
arXiv:2412.12486 · cs.CL, cs.AI, cs.IR · submitted Dec 17, 2024 · updated May 23, 2025
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