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EntropyLong: Effective Long-Context Training via Predictive Uncertainty (arxiv.org)
15 points by PaulHoule 342 days ago | hide | past | pdf | discuss on HN

In plain words: It finds hard-to-predict spots in a document, pulls in related text, and keeps only additions that make those spots easier to predict, building long sequences with long-range links. Models trained on these beat the usual stitched-together-text approach on long-context tests, especially for far-away answers.

Abstract

Training long-context language models to capture long-range dependencies requires specialized data construction. Current approaches, such as generic text concatenation or heuristic-based variants, frequently fail to guarantee genuine long-range dependencies. We propose EntropyLong, a novel data construction method that leverages predictive uncertainty to verify dependency quality. Our approach identifies high-entropy positions in documents, retrieves semantically relevant contexts from large corpora, and verifies their utility by assessing whether they reduce prediction entropy. This model-in-the-loop verification ensures each dependency represents measurable information gain rather than spurious correlation. We construct training samples with long-range dependencies by combining original documents with these verified contextual supplements. Using FineWebEdu and Cosmopedia, we generate a dataset of 128K-length sequences with verified dependencies. Models trained on this data demonstrate significant improvements on RULER benchmarks, particularly in tasks requiring distant information. Following instruction fine-tuning, our models also achieve substantial gains on LongBenchv2, demonstrating enhanced long-context understanding. Extensive ablation studies further validate the necessity and effectiveness of entropybased verification for long-context training.

Junlong Jia, Ziyang Chen, Xing Wu, Chaochen Gao, Zijia Lin, Debing Zhang, Songlin Hu, Binghui Guo
arXiv:2510.02330 · cs.CL, cs.AI · submitted Sep 26, 2025
abstract · pdf · html · work in progress; Correspondence to: Xing Wu <[email protected]>

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