Writing in the Margins: Better Inference Pattern for Long Context
  Retrieval
Authors: name: Melisa Russak; name: Umar Jamil; name: Christopher Bryant; name: Kiran Kamble; name: Axel Magnuson; name: Mateusz Russak; name: Waseem AlShikh
Published: 2024-08-27 09:34:38

Abstract: In this paper, we introduce Writing in the Margins (WiM), a new inference
pattern for Large Language Models designed to optimize the handling of long
input sequences in retrieval-oriented tasks. This approach leverages the
chunked prefill of the key-value cache to perform segment-wise inference, which
enables efficient processing of extensive contexts along with the generation
and classification of intermediate information ("margins") that guide the model
towards specific tasks. This method increases computational overhead marginally
while significantly enhancing the performance of off-the-shelf models without
the need for fine-tuning. Specifically, we observe that WiM provides an average
enhancement of 7.5% in accuracy for reasoning skills (HotpotQA, MultiHop-RAG)
and more than a 30.0% increase in the F1-score for aggregation tasks (CWE).
Additionally, we show how the proposed pattern fits into an interactive
retrieval design that provides end-users with ongoing updates about the
progress of context processing, and pinpoints the integration of relevant
information into the final response. We release our implementation of WiM using
Hugging Face Transformers library at
https://github.com/writer/writing-in-the-margins.