pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Effective Length Extrapolation via Dimension-Wise Positional Embeddings Manipulation
Authors: Yi Lu, Wanxu Zhao, Xin Zhou, Chenxin An, Chenglong Wang, Shuo Li, Yuming Yang, Jun Zhao, Tao Ji, Tao Gui, Qi Zhang, Xuanjing Huang
Date: 2025-04-26 00:00:00
Tasks: 8k, Position

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle to process and generate coherent context when the number of input tokens exceeds the pre-trained length. Recent advancements in long-context extension have significantly expanded the context window of LLMs but require expensive overhead to train the large-scale models with longer context. In this work, we propose Dimension-Wise Positional Embeddings Manipulation (DPE), a training-free framework to extrapolate the context window of LLMs by diving into RoPE's different hidden dimensions. Instead of manipulating all dimensions equally, DPE detects the effective length for every dimension and finds the key dimensions for context extension. We reuse the original position indices with their embeddings from the pre-trained model and manipulate the key dimensions' position indices to their most effective lengths. In this way, DPE adjusts the pre-trained models with minimal modifications while ensuring that each dimension reaches its optimal state for extrapolation. DPE significantly surpasses well-known baselines such as YaRN and Self-Extend. DPE enables Llama3-8k 8B to support context windows of 128k tokens without continual training and integrates seamlessly with Flash Attention 2. In addition to its impressive extrapolation capability, DPE also dramatically improves the models' performance within training length, such as Llama3.1 70B, by over 18 points on popular long-context benchmarks RULER. When compared with commercial models, Llama 3.1 70B with DPE even achieves better performance than GPT-4-128K.
Token Sequence Compression for Efficient Multimodal Computing
Authors: Yasmine Omri, Parth Shroff, Thierry Tambe
Date: 2025-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking

The exponential growth of Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) has driven advancements in cross-modal reasoning but at significant computational costs. In this work, we focus on visual language models. We highlight the redundancy and inefficiency in current vision encoders, and seek to construct an adaptive compression method for multimodal data. In this work, we characterize a panoply of visual token selection and merging approaches through both benchmarking and qualitative analysis. In particular, we demonstrate that simple cluster-level token aggregation outperforms prior state-of-the-art works in token selection and merging, including merging at the vision encoder level and attention-based approaches. We underline the redundancy in current vision encoders, and shed light on several puzzling trends regarding principles of visual token selection through cross-modal attention visualizations. This work is a first effort towards more effective encoding and processing of high-dimensional data, and paves the way for more scalable and sustainable multimodal systems.
The Sparse Frontier: Sparse Attention Trade-offs in Transformer LLMs
Authors: Piotr Nawrot, Robert Li, Renjie Huang, Sebastian Ruder, Kelly Marchisio, Edoardo M. Ponti
Date: 2025-04-24 00:00:00

Sparse attention offers a promising strategy to extend long-context capabilities in Transformer LLMs, yet its viability, its efficiency-accuracy trade-offs, and systematic scaling studies remain unexplored. To address this gap, we perform a careful comparison of training-free sparse attention methods at varying model scales, sequence lengths, and sparsity levels on a diverse collection of long-sequence tasks-including novel ones that rely on natural language while remaining controllable and easy to evaluate. Based on our experiments, we report a series of key findings: 1) an isoFLOPS analysis reveals that for very long sequences, larger and highly sparse models are preferable to smaller and dense ones. 2) The level of sparsity attainable while statistically guaranteeing accuracy preservation is higher during decoding than prefilling, and correlates with model size in the former. 3) There is no clear strategy that performs best across tasks and phases, with different units of sparsification or budget adaptivity needed for different scenarios. Even moderate sparsity levels often result in significant performance degradation on at least one task, highlighting that sparse attention is not a universal solution. 4) We introduce and validate novel scaling laws specifically tailored for sparse attention, providing evidence that our findings are likely to hold true beyond our range of experiments. Through these insights, we demonstrate that sparse attention is a key tool to enhance the capabilities of Transformer LLMs for processing longer sequences, but requires careful evaluation of trade-offs for performance-sensitive applications.
LiveLongBench: Tackling Long-Context Understanding for Spoken Texts from Live Streams
Authors: Yongxuan Wu, Runyu Chen, Peiyu Liu, Hongjin Qian
Date: 2025-04-24 00:00:00
Tasks: Long-Context Understanding, Spoken Language Understanding

Long-context understanding poses significant challenges in natural language processing, particularly for real-world dialogues characterized by speech-based elements, high redundancy, and uneven information density. Although large language models (LLMs) achieve impressive results on existing benchmarks, these datasets fail to reflect the complexities of such texts, limiting their applicability to practical scenarios. To bridge this gap, we construct the first spoken long-text dataset, derived from live streams, designed to reflect the redundancy-rich and conversational nature of real-world scenarios. We construct tasks in three categories: retrieval-dependent, reasoning-dependent, and hybrid. We then evaluate both popular LLMs and specialized methods to assess their ability to understand long-contexts in these tasks. Our results show that current methods exhibit strong task-specific preferences and perform poorly on highly redundant inputs, with no single method consistently outperforming others. We propose a new baseline that better handles redundancy in spoken text and achieves strong performance across tasks. Our findings highlight key limitations of current methods and suggest future directions for improving long-context understanding. Finally, our benchmark fills a gap in evaluating long-context spoken language understanding and provides a practical foundation for developing real-world e-commerce systems. The code and benchmark are available at https://github.com/Yarayx/livelongbench.
MOOSComp: Improving Lightweight Long-Context Compressor via Mitigating Over-Smoothing and Incorporating Outlier Scores
Authors: Fengwei Zhou, Jiafei Song, Wenjin Jason Li, Gengjian Xue, Zhikang Zhao, Yichao Lu, Bailin Na
Date: 2025-04-23 00:00:00
Tasks: Long-Context Understanding, token-classification, Token Classification

Recent advances in large language models have significantly improved their ability to process long-context input, but practical applications are challenged by increased inference time and resource consumption, particularly in resource-constrained environments. To address these challenges, we propose MOOSComp, a token-classification-based long-context compression method that enhances the performance of a BERT-based compressor by mitigating the over-smoothing problem and incorporating outlier scores. In the training phase, we add an inter-class cosine similarity loss term to penalize excessively similar token representations, thereby improving the token classification accuracy. During the compression phase, we introduce outlier scores to preserve rare but critical tokens that are prone to be discarded in task-agnostic compression. These scores are integrated with the classifier's output, making the compressor more generalizable to various tasks. Superior performance is achieved at various compression ratios on long-context understanding and reasoning benchmarks. Moreover, our method obtains a speedup of 3.3x at a 4x compression ratio on a resource-constrained mobile device.
LongMamba: Enhancing Mamba's Long Context Capabilities via Training-Free Receptive Field Enlargement
Authors: Zhifan Ye, Kejing Xia, Yonggan Fu, Xin Dong, Jihoon Hong, Xiangchi Yuan, Shizhe Diao, Jan Kautz, Pavlo Molchanov, Yingyan Celine Lin
Date: 2025-04-22 00:00:00
Tasks: Benchmarking, Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Long-Context Understanding, Mamba, State Space Models

State space models (SSMs) have emerged as an efficient alternative to Transformer models for language modeling, offering linear computational complexity and constant memory usage as context length increases. However, despite their efficiency in handling long contexts, recent studies have shown that SSMs, such as Mamba models, generally underperform compared to Transformers in long-context understanding tasks. To address this significant shortfall and achieve both efficient and accurate long-context understanding, we propose LongMamba, a training-free technique that significantly enhances the long-context capabilities of Mamba models. LongMamba builds on our discovery that the hidden channels in Mamba can be categorized into local and global channels based on their receptive field lengths, with global channels primarily responsible for long-context capability. These global channels can become the key bottleneck as the input context lengthens. Specifically, when input lengths largely exceed the training sequence length, global channels exhibit limitations in adaptively extend their receptive fields, leading to Mamba's poor long-context performance. The key idea of LongMamba is to mitigate the hidden state memory decay in these global channels by preventing the accumulation of unimportant tokens in their memory. This is achieved by first identifying critical tokens in the global channels and then applying token filtering to accumulate only those critical tokens. Through extensive benchmarking across synthetic and real-world long-context scenarios, LongMamba sets a new standard for Mamba's long-context performance, significantly extending its operational range without requiring additional training. Our code is available at https://github.com/GATECH-EIC/LongMamba.
KeepKV: Eliminating Output Perturbation in KV Cache Compression for Efficient LLMs Inference
Authors: Yuxuan Tian, Zihan Wang, Yebo Peng, Aomufei Yuan, Zhiming Wang, Bairen Yi, Xin Liu, Yong Cui, Tong Yang
Date: 2025-04-14 00:00:00

Efficient inference of large language models (LLMs) is hindered by an ever-growing key-value (KV) cache, making KV cache compression a critical research direction. Traditional methods selectively evict less important KV cache entries based on attention scores or position heuristics, which leads to information loss and hallucinations. Recently, merging-based strategies have been explored to retain more information by merging KV pairs that would be discarded; however, these existing approaches inevitably introduce inconsistencies in attention distributions before and after merging, causing output perturbation and degraded generation quality. To overcome this challenge, we propose KeepKV, a novel adaptive KV cache merging method designed to eliminate output perturbation while preserving performance under strict memory constraints. KeepKV introduces the Electoral Votes mechanism that records merging history and adaptively adjusts attention scores. Moreover, it further leverages a novel Zero Inference-Perturbation Merging methods, keeping attention consistency and compensating for attention loss resulting from cache merging. KeepKV successfully retains essential context information within a significantly compressed cache. Extensive experiments on various benchmarks and LLM architectures demonstrate that KeepKV substantially reduces memory usage, enhances inference throughput by more than 2x and keeps superior generation quality even with 10% KV cache budgets.
Long Context In-Context Compression by Getting to the Gist of Gisting
Authors: Aleksandar Petrov, Mark Sandler, Andrey Zhmoginov, Nolan Miller, Max Vladymyrov
Date: 2025-04-11 00:00:00
Tasks: Decoder

Long context processing is critical for the adoption of LLMs, but existing methods often introduce architectural complexity that hinders their practical adoption. Gisting, an in-context compression method with no architectural modification to the decoder transformer, is a promising approach due to its simplicity and compatibility with existing frameworks. While effective for short instructions, we demonstrate that gisting struggles with longer contexts, with significant performance drops even at minimal compression rates. Surprisingly, a simple average pooling baseline consistently outperforms gisting. We analyze the limitations of gisting, including information flow interruptions, capacity limitations and the inability to restrict its attention to subsets of the context. Motivated by theoretical insights into the performance gap between gisting and average pooling, and supported by extensive experimentation, we propose GistPool, a new in-context compression method. GistPool preserves the simplicity of gisting, while significantly boosting its performance on long context compression tasks.
Scale-Free Graph-Language Models
Authors: Jianglin Lu, Yixuan Liu, Yitian Zhang, Yun Fu
Date: 2025-02-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Graph Generation

Graph-language models (GLMs) have demonstrated great potential in graph-based semi-supervised learning. A typical GLM consists of two key stages: graph generation and text embedding, which are usually implemented by inferring a latent graph and finetuning a language model (LM), respectively. However, the former often relies on artificial assumptions about the underlying edge distribution, while the latter requires extensive data annotations. To tackle these challenges, this paper introduces a novel GLM that integrates graph generation and text embedding within a unified framework. Specifically, for graph generation, we leverage an inherent characteristic of real edge distribution--the scale-free property--as a structural prior. We unexpectedly find that this natural property can be effectively approximated by a simple k-nearest neighbor (KNN) graph. For text embedding, we develop a graph-based pseudo-labeler that utilizes scale-free graphs to provide complementary supervision for improved LM finetuning. Extensive experiments on representative datasets validate our findings on the scale-free structural approximation of KNN graphs and demonstrate the effectiveness of integrating graph generation and text embedding with a real structural prior. Our code is available at https://github.com/Jianglin954/SFGL.
FusionNet: Multi-model Linear Fusion Framework for Low-light Image Enhancement
Authors: Kangbiao Shi, Yixu Feng, Tao Hu, Yu Cao, Peng Wu, Yijin Liang, Yanning Zhang, Qingsen Yan
Date: 2025-04-27 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Enhancement, Low-Light Image Enhancement

The advent of Deep Neural Networks (DNNs) has driven remarkable progress in low-light image enhancement (LLIE), with diverse architectures (e.g., CNNs and Transformers) and color spaces (e.g., sRGB, HSV, HVI) yielding impressive results. Recent efforts have sought to leverage the complementary strengths of these paradigms, offering promising solutions to enhance performance across varying degradation scenarios. However, existing fusion strategies are hindered by challenges such as parameter explosion, optimization instability, and feature misalignment, limiting further improvements. To overcome these issues, we introduce FusionNet, a novel multi-model linear fusion framework that operates in parallel to effectively capture global and local features across diverse color spaces. By incorporating a linear fusion strategy underpinned by Hilbert space theoretical guarantees, FusionNet mitigates network collapse and reduces excessive training costs. Our method achieved 1st place in the CVPR2025 NTIRE Low Light Enhancement Challenge. Extensive experiments conducted on synthetic and real-world benchmark datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art methods in terms of both quantitative and qualitative results, delivering robust enhancement under diverse low-light conditions.
Visual Text Processing: A Comprehensive Review and Unified Evaluation
Authors: Yan Shu, Weichao Zeng, Fangmin Zhao, Zeyu Chen, Zhenhang Li, Xiaomeng Yang, Yu Zhou, Paolo Rota, Xiang Bai, Lianwen Jin, Xu-Cheng Yin, Nicu Sebe
Date: 2025-04-30 00:00:00
Tasks: Image Manipulation, Image Reconstruction, Text Detection

Visual text is a crucial component in both document and scene images, conveying rich semantic information and attracting significant attention in the computer vision community. Beyond traditional tasks such as text detection and recognition, visual text processing has witnessed rapid advancements driven by the emergence of foundation models, including text image reconstruction and text image manipulation. Despite significant progress, challenges remain due to the unique properties that differentiate text from general objects. Effectively capturing and leveraging these distinct textual characteristics is essential for developing robust visual text processing models. In this survey, we present a comprehensive, multi-perspective analysis of recent advancements in visual text processing, focusing on two key questions: (1) What textual features are most suitable for different visual text processing tasks? (2) How can these distinctive text features be effectively incorporated into processing frameworks? Furthermore, we introduce VTPBench, a new benchmark that encompasses a broad range of visual text processing datasets. Leveraging the advanced visual quality assessment capabilities of multimodal large language models (MLLMs), we propose VTPScore, a novel evaluation metric designed to ensure fair and reliable evaluation. Our empirical study with more than 20 specific models reveals substantial room for improvement in the current techniques. Our aim is to establish this work as a fundamental resource that fosters future exploration and innovation in the dynamic field of visual text processing. The relevant repository is available at https://github.com/shuyansy/Visual-Text-Processing-survey.
Manifold Induced Biases for Zero-shot and Few-shot Detection of Generated Images
Authors: Jonathan Brokman, Amit Giloni, Omer Hofman, Roman Vainshtein, Hisashi Kojima, Guy Gilboa
Date: 2025-04-21 00:00:00
Tasks: Mixture-of-Experts

Distinguishing between real and AI-generated images, commonly referred to as 'image detection', presents a timely and significant challenge. Despite extensive research in the (semi-)supervised regime, zero-shot and few-shot solutions have only recently emerged as promising alternatives. Their main advantage is in alleviating the ongoing data maintenance, which quickly becomes outdated due to advances in generative technologies. We identify two main gaps: (1) a lack of theoretical grounding for the methods, and (2) significant room for performance improvements in zero-shot and few-shot regimes. Our approach is founded on understanding and quantifying the biases inherent in generated content, where we use these quantities as criteria for characterizing generated images. Specifically, we explore the biases of the implicit probability manifold, captured by a pre-trained diffusion model. Through score-function analysis, we approximate the curvature, gradient, and bias towards points on the probability manifold, establishing criteria for detection in the zero-shot regime. We further extend our contribution to the few-shot setting by employing a mixture-of-experts methodology. Empirical results across 20 generative models demonstrate that our method outperforms current approaches in both zero-shot and few-shot settings. This work advances the theoretical understanding and practical usage of generated content biases through the lens of manifold analysis.
AutoJudge: Judge Decoding Without Manual Annotation
Authors: Roman Garipov, Fedor Velikonivtsev, Ruslan Svirschevski, Vage Egiazarian, Max Ryabinin
Date: 2025-04-28 00:00:00
Tasks: GSM8K, Large Language Model

We introduce AutoJudge, a framework that accelerates large language model (LLM) inference with task-specific lossy speculative decoding. Instead of matching the original model output distribution token-by-token, we identify which of the generated tokens affect the downstream quality of the generated response, relaxing the guarantee so that the "unimportant" tokens can be generated faster. Our approach relies on a semi-greedy search algorithm to test which of the mismatches between target and draft model should be corrected to preserve quality, and which ones may be skipped. We then train a lightweight classifier based on existing LLM embeddings to predict, at inference time, which mismatching tokens can be safely accepted without compromising the final answer quality. We test our approach with Llama 3.2 1B (draft) and Llama 3.1 8B (target) models on zero-shot GSM8K reasoning, where it achieves up to 1.5x more accepted tokens per verification cycle with under 1% degradation in answer accuracy compared to standard speculative decoding and over 2x with small loss in accuracy. When applied to the LiveCodeBench benchmark, our approach automatically detects other, programming-specific important tokens and shows similar speedups, demonstrating its ability to generalize across tasks.
MergeVQ: A Unified Framework for Visual Generation and Representation with Disentangled Token Merging and Quantization
Authors: Siyuan Li, Luyuan Zhang, Zedong Wang, Juanxi Tian, Cheng Tan, Zicheng Liu, Chang Yu, Qingsong Xie, Haonan Lu, Haoqian Wang, Zhen Lei
Date: 2025-04-01 00:00:00
Proceeding: CVPR 2025 1
Tasks: Image Generation, Image Reconstruction, Quantization, Representation Learning

Masked Image Modeling (MIM) with Vector Quantization (VQ) has achieved great success in both self-supervised pre-training and image generation. However, most existing methods struggle to address the trade-off in shared latent space for generation quality vs. representation learning and efficiency. To push the limits of this paradigm, we propose MergeVQ, which incorporates token merging techniques into VQ-based generative models to bridge the gap between image generation and visual representation learning in a unified architecture. During pre-training, MergeVQ decouples top-k semantics from latent space with the token merge module after self-attention blocks in the encoder for subsequent Look-up Free Quantization (LFQ) and global alignment and recovers their fine-grained details through cross-attention in the decoder for reconstruction. As for the second-stage generation, we introduce MergeAR, which performs KV Cache compression for efficient raster-order prediction. Extensive experiments on ImageNet verify that MergeVQ as an AR generative model achieves competitive performance in both visual representation learning and image generation tasks while maintaining favorable token efficiency and inference speed. The code and model will be available at https://apexgen-x.github.io/MergeVQ.