h-index17
26papers
749citations
Novelty56%
AI Score62

26 Papers

CLMay 14, 2022
RASAT: Integrating Relational Structures into Pretrained Seq2Seq Model for Text-to-SQL

Jiexing Qi, Jingyao Tang, Ziwei He et al. · meta-ai, mila

Relational structures such as schema linking and schema encoding have been validated as a key component to qualitatively translating natural language into SQL queries. However, introducing these structural relations comes with prices: they often result in a specialized model structure, which largely prohibits using large pretrained models in text-to-SQL. To address this problem, we propose RASAT: a Transformer seq2seq architecture augmented with relation-aware self-attention that could leverage a variety of relational structures while inheriting the pretrained parameters from the T5 model effectively. Our model can incorporate almost all types of existing relations in the literature, and in addition, we propose introducing co-reference relations for the multi-turn scenario. Experimental results on three widely used text-to-SQL datasets, covering both single-turn and multi-turn scenarios, have shown that RASAT could achieve state-of-the-art results across all three benchmarks (75.5% EX on Spider, 52.6% IEX on SParC, and 37.4% IEX on CoSQL).

94.0CLJun 3
Depth-Attention: Cross-Layer Value Mixing for Language Models

Boyi Zeng, Yiqin Hao, Zitong Wang et al.

Self-attention selects information freely across the sequence, but across depth, Transformers merely add each layer's output to the residual stream, so later layers cannot selectively reuse earlier-layer representations. Recent cross-layer methods improve this flow but operate on hidden states outside attention, adding state beyond the key-value cache at inference--a cost that becomes increasingly salient as modern LLMs compress the cache with grouped-query and multi-head latent attention. We introduce Depth-Attention, which performs this selection inside the attention module itself: before a layer attends over the sequence, its query attends over the keys of earlier layers at the same token position and mixes their values into the value that self-attention then reads. Because Depth-Attention reuses the standard attention queries, keys, and value-cache slots, storing depth-mixed values in place of the original values, it adds no parameters and introduces no persistent inference state beyond the standard key-value cache--the same cache size as a vanilla decoder and less than hidden-state-based cross-layer methods. On Qwen3-style decoders at 1.5B and 3B parameters, Depth-Attention attains the lowest perplexity and the highest average downstream accuracy, improving over the vanilla Transformer by up to 2.3 accuracy points and surpassing strong cross-layer baselines in perplexity and average accuracy, while adding under 0.01% extra arithmetic FLOPs and no additional persistent inference state. The gains hold from 360M to 3B parameters and extend to looped Transformers.

CLNov 13, 2023Code
Fovea Transformer: Efficient Long-Context Modeling with Structured Fine-to-Coarse Attention

Ziwei He, Jian Yuan, Le Zhou et al.

The quadratic complexity of self-attention in Transformers has hindered the processing of long text. To alleviate this problem, previous works have proposed to sparsify the attention matrix, taking advantage of the observation that crucial information about a token can be derived from its neighbors. These methods typically combine one or another form of local attention and global attention. Such combinations introduce abrupt changes in contextual granularity when going from local to global, which may be undesirable. We believe that a smoother transition could potentially enhance model's ability to capture long-context dependencies. In this study, we introduce Fovea Transformer, a long-context focused transformer that addresses the challenges of capturing global dependencies while maintaining computational efficiency. To achieve this, we construct a multi-scale tree from the input sequence, and use representations of context tokens with a progressively coarser granularity in the tree, as their distance to the query token increases. We evaluate our model on three long-context summarization tasks\footnote{Our code is publicly available at: \textit{https://github.com/ZiweiHe/Fovea-Transformer}}. It achieves state-of-the-art performance on two of them, and competitive results on the third with mixed improvement and setback of the evaluation metrics.

CLFeb 9, 2023
Few-Shot Table-to-Text Generation with Prompt Planning and Knowledge Memorization

Zhixin Guo, Minyxuan Yan, Jiexing Qi et al. · meta-ai, mila

Pre-trained language models (PLM) have achieved remarkable advancement in table-to-text generation tasks. However, the lack of labeled domain-specific knowledge and the topology gap between tabular data and text make it difficult for PLMs to yield faithful text. Low-resource generation likewise faces unique challenges in this domain. Inspired by how humans descript tabular data with prior knowledge, we suggest a new framework: PromptMize, which targets table-to-text generation under few-shot settings. The design of our framework consists of two aspects: a prompt planner and a knowledge adapter. The prompt planner aims to generate a prompt signal that provides instance guidance for PLMs to bridge the topology gap between tabular data and text. Moreover, the knowledge adapter memorizes domain-specific knowledge from the unlabelled corpus to supply essential information during generation. Extensive experiments and analyses are investigated on three open domain few-shot NLG datasets: human, song, and book. Compared with previous state-of-the-art approaches, our model achieves remarkable performance in generating quality as judged by human and automatic evaluations.

CLFeb 24, 2023
Adapting Knowledge for Few-shot Table-to-Text Generation

Zhixin Guo, Minyxuan Yan, Jiexing Qi et al. · meta-ai, mila

Pretrained language models (PLMs) have made remarkable progress in table-to-text generation tasks. However, the lack of domain-specific knowledge makes it challenging to bridge the topological gap between tabular data and text, especially in real-world applications with limited resources. To mitigate the limitation of insufficient labeled data, we propose a novel framework: Adapt-Knowledge-to-Generate (AKG). The core insight of AKG is to adapt unlabeled domain-specific knowledge into the model, which brings at least three benefits: (1) it injects representation of normal table-related descriptions to bridge the topological gap between tabular data and texts; (2) it enables us to use large amounts of unlabeled domain-specific knowledge fully, which can alleviate the PLMs' inherent shortcomings of lacking domain knowledge; (3) it allows us to design various tasks to employ the domain-specific knowledge. Extensive experiments and analyses are conducted on three open-domain, few-shot natural language generation (NLG) data sets: Humans, Songs, and Books. Compared to previous state-of-the-art approaches, our model achieves superior performance in terms of both fluency and accuracy as judged by human and automatic evaluations.

CVFeb 9Code
MOVA: Towards Scalable and Synchronized Video-Audio Generation

SII-OpenMOSS Team, Donghua Yu, Mingshu Chen et al.

Audio is indispensable for real-world video, yet generation models have largely overlooked audio components. Current approaches to producing audio-visual content often rely on cascaded pipelines, which increase cost, accumulate errors, and degrade overall quality. While systems such as Veo 3 and Sora 2 emphasize the value of simultaneous generation, joint multimodal modeling introduces unique challenges in architecture, data, and training. Moreover, the closed-source nature of existing systems limits progress in the field. In this work, we introduce MOVA (MOSS Video and Audio), an open-source model capable of generating high-quality, synchronized audio-visual content, including realistic lip-synced speech, environment-aware sound effects, and content-aligned music. MOVA employs a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, with a total of 32B parameters, of which 18B are active during inference. It supports IT2VA (Image-Text to Video-Audio) generation task. By releasing the model weights and code, we aim to advance research and foster a vibrant community of creators. The released codebase features comprehensive support for efficient inference, LoRA fine-tuning, and prompt enhancement.

CLDec 8, 2025Code
Beyond Real: Imaginary Extension of Rotary Position Embeddings for Long-Context LLMs

Xiaoran Liu, Yuerong Song, Zhigeng Liu et al.

Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE) have become a standard for encoding sequence order in Large Language Models (LLMs) by applying rotations to query and key vectors in the complex plane. Standard implementations, however, utilize only the real component of the complex-valued dot product for attention score calculation. This simplification discards the imaginary component, which contains valuable phase information, leading to a potential loss of relational details crucial for modeling long-context dependencies. In this paper, we propose an extension that re-incorporates this discarded imaginary component. Our method leverages the full complex-valued representation to create a dual-component attention score. We theoretically and empirically demonstrate that this approach enhances the modeling of long-context dependencies by preserving more positional information. Furthermore, evaluations on a suite of long-context language modeling benchmarks show that our method consistently improves performance over the standard RoPE, with the benefits becoming more significant as context length increases. The code is available at https://github.com/OpenMOSS/rope_pp.

CLAug 4, 2025Code
Sparse-dLLM: Accelerating Diffusion LLMs with Dynamic Cache Eviction

Yuerong Song, Xiaoran Liu, Ruixiao Li et al.

Diffusion Large Language Models (dLLMs) enable breakthroughs in reasoning and parallel decoding but suffer from prohibitive quadratic computational complexity and memory overhead during inference. Current caching techniques accelerate decoding by storing full-layer states, yet impose substantial memory usage that limit long-context applications. Our analysis of attention patterns in dLLMs reveals persistent cross-layer sparsity, with pivotal tokens remaining salient across decoding steps and low-relevance tokens staying unimportant, motivating selective cache eviction. We propose Sparse-dLLM, the first training-free framework integrating dynamic cache eviction with sparse attention via delayed bidirectional sparse caching. By leveraging the stability of token saliency over steps, it retains critical tokens and dynamically evicts unimportant prefix/suffix entries using an attention-guided strategy. Extensive experiments on LLaDA and Dream series demonstrate Sparse-dLLM achieves up to 10$\times$ higher throughput than vanilla dLLMs, with comparable performance and similar peak memory costs, outperforming previous methods in efficiency and effectiveness. The code is available at https://github.com/OpenMOSS/Sparse-dLLM.

CLJun 17, 2025Code
LongLLaDA: Unlocking Long Context Capabilities in Diffusion LLMs

Xiaoran Liu, Yuerong Song, Zhigeng Liu et al.

Large Language Diffusion Models, or diffusion LLMs, have emerged as a significant focus in NLP research, with substantial effort directed toward understanding their scalability and downstream task performance. However, their long-context capabilities remain unexplored, lacking systematic analysis or methods for context extension. In this work, we present the first systematic investigation comparing the long-context performance of diffusion LLMs and traditional auto-regressive LLMs. We first identify a unique characteristic of diffusion LLMs, unlike auto-regressive LLMs, they maintain remarkably stable perplexity during direct context extrapolation. Moreover, where auto-regressive models fail outright during the Needle-In-A-Haystack task with context exceeding their pretrained length, we discover diffusion LLMs exhibit a distinct local perception phenomenon, enabling successful retrieval from recent context segments. We explain both phenomena through the lens of Rotary Position Embedding (RoPE) scaling theory. Building on these observations, we propose LongLLaDA, a training-free method that integrates LLaDA with the NTK-based RoPE extrapolation. Our results validate that established extrapolation scaling laws remain effective for extending the context windows of diffusion LLMs. Furthermore, we identify long-context tasks where diffusion LLMs outperform auto-regressive LLMs and others where they fall short. Consequently, this study establishes the first length extrapolation method for diffusion LLMs while providing essential theoretical insights and empirical benchmarks critical for advancing future research on long-context diffusion LLMs. The code is available at https://github.com/OpenMOSS/LongLLaDA.

CLMay 27, 2025Code
Pretraining Language Models to Ponder in Continuous Space

Boyi Zeng, Shixiang Song, Siyuan Huang et al.

Humans ponder before articulating complex sentence elements, enabling deeper cognitive processing through focused effort. In this work, we introduce this pondering process into language models by repeatedly invoking the forward process within a single token generation step. During pondering, instead of generating an actual token sampled from the prediction distribution, the model ponders by yielding a weighted sum of all token embeddings according to the predicted token distribution. The generated embedding is then fed back as input for another forward pass. We show that the model can learn to ponder in this way through self-supervised learning, without any human annotations. Experiments across three widely used open-source architectures-GPT-2, Pythia, and LLaMA-and extensive downstream task evaluations demonstrate the effectiveness and generality of our method. For language modeling tasks, pondering language models achieve performance comparable to vanilla models with twice the number of parameters. On 9 downstream benchmarks, our pondering-enhanced Pythia models significantly outperform the official Pythia models. Notably, PonderingPythia-2.8B surpasses Pythia-6.9B, and PonderingPythia-1B is comparable to TinyLlama-1.1B, which is trained on 10 times more data. The code is available at https://github.com/LUMIA-Group/PonderingLM.

CLFeb 24, 2025Code
Thus Spake Long-Context Large Language Model

Xiaoran Liu, Ruixiao Li, Mianqiu Huang et al.

Long context is an important topic in Natural Language Processing (NLP), running through the development of NLP architectures, and offers immense opportunities for Large Language Models (LLMs), giving LLMs the lifelong learning potential akin to humans. Unfortunately, the pursuit of a long context is accompanied by numerous obstacles. Nevertheless, long context remains a core competitive advantage for LLMs. In the past two years, the context length of LLMs has achieved a breakthrough extension to millions of tokens. Moreover, research on long-context LLMs has expanded beyond length extrapolation to a comprehensive focus on architecture, infrastructure, training, and evaluation technologies. Inspired by the symphonic poem, Thus Spake Zarathustra, we draw an analogy between the journey of extending the context of LLM and the attempts of humans to transcend their mortality. In this survey, we will illustrate how LLM struggles between the tremendous need for a longer context and its equal need to accept the fact that it is ultimately finite. To achieve this, we give a global picture of the lifecycle of long-context LLMs from four perspectives: architecture, infrastructure, training, and evaluation, showcasing the full spectrum of long-context technologies. At the end of this survey, we will present 10 unanswered questions currently faced by long-context LLMs. We hope this survey can serve as a systematic introduction to research on long-context LLMs. Video: https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV11h9AYoEYj. Github: https://github.com/OpenMOSS/Thus-Spake-Long-Context-LLM.

CLJan 30
FourierSampler: Unlocking Non-Autoregressive Potential in Diffusion Language Models via Frequency-Guided Generation

Siyang He, Qiqi Wang, Xiaoran Liu et al.

Despite the non-autoregressive potential of diffusion language models (dLLMs), existing decoding strategies demonstrate positional bias, failing to fully unlock the potential of arbitrary generation. In this work, we delve into the inherent spectral characteristics of dLLMs and present the first frequency-domain analysis showing that low-frequency components in hidden states primarily encode global structural information and long-range dependencies, while high-frequency components are responsible for characterizing local details. Based on this observation, we propose FourierSampler, which leverages a frequency-domain sliding window mechanism to dynamically guide the model to achieve a "structure-to-detail" generation. FourierSampler outperforms other inference enhancement strategies on LLADA and SDAR, achieving relative improvements of 20.4% on LLaDA1.5-8B and 16.0% on LLaDA-8B-Instruct. It notably surpasses similarly sized autoregressive models like Llama3.1-8B-Instruct.

89.1CLMar 17
VQKV: High-Fidelity and High-Ratio Cache Compression via Vector-Quantization

Yixuan Wang, Qingyu Shi, Jiayu Zhou et al.

The growing context length of Large Language Models (LLMs) enlarges the Key-Value (KV) cache, limiting deployment in resource-limited environments. Prior training-free approaches for KV cache compression typically rely on low-rank approximation or scalar quantization, which fail to simultaneously achieve high compression ratios and high reconstruction fidelity. We propose VQKV, a novel, training-free method introducing vector quantization (VQ) to obtain highly compressed KV representations while preserving high model fidelity, allowing for the representation of thousands of floating-point values with just a few integer indices. As a result, VQKV achieves an 82.8\% compression ratio on LLaMA3.1-8B while retaining 98.6\% of the baseline performance on LongBench and enabling 4.3x longer generation length on the same memory footprint.

CLMar 3
CoDAR: Continuous Diffusion Language Models are More Powerful Than You Think

Junzhe Shen, Jieru Zhao, Ziwei He et al.

We study why continuous diffusion language models (DLMs) have lagged behind discrete diffusion approaches despite their appealing continuous generative dynamics. Under a controlled token--recovery study, we identify token rounding, the final projection from denoised embeddings to tokens, as a primary bottleneck. Building on these insights, we propose CoDAR (Continuous Diffusion with Contextual AutoRegressive Decoder), a two--stage framework that keeps diffusion entirely continuous in an embedding space while learning a strong, context--conditional discretizer: an autoregressive Transformer decoder that cross--attends to the denoised embedding sequence and performs contextualized rounding to tokens. Experiments on LM1B and OpenWebText demonstrate that CoDAR substantially improves generation quality over latent diffusion and becomes competitive with strong discrete DLMs, while exposing a simple decoder--temperature knob to navigate the fluency--diversity trade off.

CLFeb 9
Pretraining with Token-Level Adaptive Latent Chain-of-Thought

Boyi Zeng, Yiqin Hao, He Li et al.

Scaling large language models by increasing parameters and training data is increasingly constrained by limited high-quality corpora and rising communication costs. This work explores an alternative axis: increasing per-token computation without expanding parameters, by internalizing latent Chain-of-Thought (CoT) into pretraining. We propose Pretraining with Token-Level Adaptive Latent CoT (adaptive latent CoT), where the model generates a variable-length latent CoT trajectory before emitting each token -- allocating longer trajectories to difficult tokens and shorter (or even zero) trajectories to easy ones. Importantly, this behavior emerges naturally from one-stage pretraining on general text and reduces computation in both training and inference via token-wise adaptive halting. Experiments with Llama architectures show that adaptive latent CoT consistently improves language modeling perplexity and broad downstream accuracy, even with fewer training FLOPs than prior recurrent baselines.

CLOct 8, 2025Code
AWM: Accurate Weight-Matrix Fingerprint for Large Language Models

Boyi Zeng, Lin Chen, Ziwei He et al.

Protecting the intellectual property of large language models (LLMs) is crucial, given the substantial resources required for their training. Consequently, there is an urgent need for both model owners and third parties to determine whether a suspect LLM is trained from scratch or derived from an existing base model. However, the intensive post-training processes that models typically undergo-such as supervised fine-tuning, extensive continued pretraining, reinforcement learning, multi-modal extension, pruning, and upcycling-pose significant challenges to reliable identification. In this work, we propose a training-free fingerprinting method based on weight matrices. We leverage the Linear Assignment Problem (LAP) and an unbiased Centered Kernel Alignment (CKA) similarity to neutralize the effects of parameter manipulations, yielding a highly robust and high-fidelity similarity metric. On a comprehensive testbed of 60 positive and 90 negative model pairs, our method demonstrates exceptional robustness against all six aforementioned post-training categories while exhibiting a near-zero risk of false positives. By achieving perfect scores on all classification metrics, our approach establishes a strong basis for reliable model lineage verification. Moreover, the entire computation completes within 30s on an NVIDIA 3090 GPU. The code is available at https://github.com/LUMIA-Group/AWM.

CLMay 24, 2023Code
Fourier Transformer: Fast Long Range Modeling by Removing Sequence Redundancy with FFT Operator

Ziwei He, Meng Yang, Minwei Feng et al.

The transformer model is known to be computationally demanding, and prohibitively costly for long sequences, as the self-attention module uses a quadratic time and space complexity with respect to sequence length. Many researchers have focused on designing new forms of self-attention or introducing new parameters to overcome this limitation, however a large portion of them prohibits the model to inherit weights from large pretrained models. In this work, the transformer's inefficiency has been taken care of from another perspective. We propose Fourier Transformer, a simple yet effective approach by progressively removing redundancies in hidden sequence using the ready-made Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) operator to perform Discrete Cosine Transformation (DCT). Fourier Transformer is able to significantly reduce computational costs while retain the ability to inherit from various large pretrained models. Experiments show that our model achieves state-of-the-art performances among all transformer-based models on the long-range modeling benchmark LRA with significant improvement in both speed and space. For generative seq-to-seq tasks including CNN/DailyMail and ELI5, by inheriting the BART weights our model outperforms the standard BART and other efficient models. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/LUMIA-Group/FourierTransformer

CLMar 2
AdaPonderLM: Gated Pondering Language Models with Token-Wise Adaptive Depth

Shixiang Song, He Li, Zitong Wang et al.

Test-time scaling via recurrent/iterative Transformers enables large language models to spend more computation at inference, but most pretrained recurrent LMs run a fixed number of iterations, wasting compute on easy tokens and lacking token-wise adaptivity. Following the core idea of Adaptive Computation Time(ACT) and Early Exit(EE), we propose AdaPonderLM, a self-supervised recurrent language model that learns token-wise early exiting during pretraining without manually tuned per-token/per-layer pruning ratios. AdaPonderLM uses iteration-specific MLP gates with a monotonic halting mask to decide when each token stops recurring, and introduces a KV reuse mechanism that reuses cached key/value states for halted tokens, ensuring train--test consistency and practical acceleration. Across Pythia backbones from 70M to 410M (pretraining) and up to 2.8B (continued pretraining), AdaPonderLM reduces inference compute at about 10% while maintaining comparable language modeling perplexity and competitive downstream accuracy. Our analysis shows the learned gates allocate more computation to high-NLL (hard) tokens, exhibiting adaptive computation time behavior in a fully self-supervised setting. Meanwhile, under iso-FLOPs, the learned halting policy consistently outperforms fixed pruning, showing AdaPonderLM allocates compute to the right tokens rather than just reducing average depth.

CLMar 2
PonderLM-3: Adaptive Token-Wise Pondering with Differentiable Masking

He Li, Feichen Song, Boyi Zeng et al.

Test-time scaling has shown that allocating more additional computation at inference can improve generation quality, motivating a natural follow-up question: where should this computation be spent? Building on this insight, we introduce PonderLM-3, a pretraining framework for token-wise adaptive pondering that learns to selectively allocate additional computation under purely self-supervised objectives, built on top of the PonderLM-2 backbone. This makes additional inference computation an allocatable per-token resource, so tokens receive more computation only when it is beneficial, rather than paying a uniform extra cost. To make this allocation learnable while maintaining train-inference consistency, PonderLM-3 injects a differentiable attention mask during pretraining and pairs it with a matching hard pruning rule at inference. PonderLM-3 defines a stronger Pareto frontier: compared with existing recursive or adaptive baselines, it achieves lower pretraining perplexity at equal inference FLOPs. On downstream benchmarks, PonderLM-3 attains comparable performance to fixed-step PonderLM-2 under the same maximum number of additional computation steps, while using fewer inference FLOPs in practice. Overall, PonderLM-3 provides an end-to-end differentiable and train-inference consistent framework for token-wise adaptive computation, enabling additional inference compute to be allocated where it is most useful rather than paid uniformly by every token.

CLDec 8, 2023
Towards Controlled Table-to-Text Generation with Scientific Reasoning

Zhixin Guo, Jianping Zhou, Jiexing Qi et al.

The sheer volume of scientific experimental results and complex technical statements, often presented in tabular formats, presents a formidable barrier to individuals acquiring preferred information. The realms of scientific reasoning and content generation that adhere to user preferences encounter distinct challenges. In this work, we present a new task for generating fluent and logical descriptions that match user preferences over scientific tabular data, aiming to automate scientific document analysis. To facilitate research in this direction, we construct a new challenging dataset CTRLSciTab consisting of table-description pairs extracted from the scientific literature, with highlighted cells and corresponding domain-specific knowledge base. We evaluated popular pre-trained language models to establish a baseline and proposed a novel architecture outperforming competing approaches. The results showed that large models struggle to produce accurate content that aligns with user preferences. As the first of its kind, our work should motivate further research in scientific domains.

CLJun 13, 2025
Beyond Homogeneous Attention: Memory-Efficient LLMs via Fourier-Approximated KV Cache

Xiaoran Liu, Siyang He, Qiqi Wang et al.

Large Language Models struggle with memory demands from the growing Key-Value (KV) cache as context lengths increase. Existing compression methods homogenize head dimensions or rely on attention-guided token pruning, often sacrificing accuracy or introducing computational overhead. We propose FourierAttention, a training-free framework that exploits the heterogeneous roles of transformer head dimensions: lower dimensions prioritize local context, while upper ones capture long-range dependencies. By projecting the long-context-insensitive dimensions onto orthogonal Fourier bases, FourierAttention approximates their temporal evolution with fixed-length spectral coefficients. Evaluations on LLaMA models show that FourierAttention achieves the best long-context accuracy on LongBench and Needle-In-A-Haystack (NIAH). Besides, a custom Triton kernel, FlashFourierAttention, is designed to optimize memory via streamlined read-write operations, enabling efficient deployment without performance compromise.

CLMar 3, 2025
WeightedKV: Attention Scores Weighted Key-Value Cache Merging for Large Language Models

Jian Yuan, Ziwei He, Haoli Bai et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) use key-value (KV) cache to reduce redundant computation in autoregressive generation. However, the KV cache size increases linearly during generation, leading to excessive memory usage, especially for long texts. Most KV cache compression methods evict the unimportant KV pairs to maintain a fixed cache size, which leads to the permanent loss of tokens during generation. However, singular value decomposition shows that \textit{values} do not exhibit a strong low-rank property as \textit{keys} do, suggesting that information is distributed more evenly across \textit{values}, in contrast to its more redundant distribution within \textit{keys}. Therefore, methods that evict both \textit{keys} and \textit{values} risk losing crucial information and compromise context integrity, ultimately degrading the output quality. To address this problem, we propose WeightedKV, a novel, training-free approach that discards the \textit{keys} of less important tokens, while merging their \textit{values} into neighboring tokens via a convex combination weighted by their average attention scores. In this way, the retained \textit{keys} serve as anchors that guide the generation process, while the merged \textit{values} provide a rich contextual backdrop. We assess our method on four widely used language modeling datasets, demonstrating superior performance compared to all baseline methods, particularly with a lower budget ratio.

CLMay 1, 2025
FreqKV: Frequency Domain Key-Value Compression for Efficient Context Window Extension

Jushi Kai, Boyi Zeng, Yixuan Wang et al.

Frequency-domain compression has proven effective in reducing redundancies for spatial signals. In this work, we propose FreqKV, a novel frequency domain key-value (KV) compression technique that enables efficient context window extension for decoder-only large language models (LLMs). Our approach is motivated by a key observation that, in the frequency domain, the energy distribution of the KV cache is predominantly concentrated in low-frequency components. By discarding high-frequency components, we achieve efficient compression of the KV cache with minimal information loss. FreqKV iteratively compresses the increasing KV cache to a fixed size in the frequency domain, allowing models to process lengthy contexts efficiently. Introducing no additional parameters or architectural modifications, FreqKV is applicable to both fine-tuning and inference. With minimal fine-tuning, LLMs can learn to leverage the limited cache that is compressed in the frequency domain and extend the context window. Experiments on a range of long context language modeling and understanding tasks demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method.

CLJan 9, 2025
TreeKV: Smooth Key-Value Cache Compression with Tree Structures

Ziwei He, Jian Yuan, Haoli Bai et al.

Efficient key-value (KV) cache compression is critical for scaling transformer-based Large Language Models (LLMs) in long sequences and resource-limited settings. Existing methods evict tokens based on their positions or importance scores, but position-based strategies can miss crucial information outside predefined regions, while those relying on global importance scores resulting in strong regional biases, limiting the KV cache's overall context retention and potentially impairing the performance of LLMs on complex tasks. Our wavelet analysis reveals that as tokens approach the end of sequence, their contributions to generation gradually increase and tends to diverge more from neighboring tokens, indicating a smooth transition with increasing complexity and variability from distant to nearby context. Motivated by this observation, we propose TreeKV, an intuitive, training-free method that employs a tree structure for smooth cache compression. TreeKV maintains a fixed cache size, allowing LLMs to deliver high-quality output even in long text scenarios. Unlike most compression methods, TreeKV is applicable to both the generation and prefilling stages. TreeKV consistently surpasses all baseline models in language modeling tasks on PG19 and OpenWebText2, allowing LLMs trained with short context window to generalize to longer window with a 16x cache reduction. On the Longbench benchmark, TreeKV achieves the best performance with only 6\% of the budget at optimal efficiency.

CLSep 27, 2025
PonderLM-2: Pretraining LLM with Latent Thoughts in Continuous Space

Boyi Zeng, He Li, Shixiang Song et al.

The remarkable success of Chain-of-Thought (CoT), which enhances performance by scaling generation steps at test-time, inspires us to ask: can we leverage a similar scaling of computational steps during pretraining to improve the generation of each individual token? To address this, we propose a novel pre-training methodology: Pretraining Language Models with Latent Thoughts (PonderLM-2). Our approach pretrains a language model (LM) to first generate an intermediate latent thought-the last hidden state of the current position-which is then used as input to predict the actual subsequent token. This additional computational step enables the LM to refine its prediction within unconstrained continuous space. Our experiments demonstrate that, at an identical inference cost, a LM that generates one additional latent thought per token outperforms a standard model with double the parameters. For instance, our PonderLM-2-Pythia-1.4B, pretrained on 300B tokens from the Pile, significantly surpasses the vanilla Pythia-2.8B trained on the same data on both language modeling and a range of general downstream tasks. Furthermore, increasing the number of latent thoughts generated before each actual token-forming a chain analogous to CoT-consistently improves the model's performance.

CVAug 8, 2025
Fourier-VLM: Compressing Vision Tokens in the Frequency Domain for Large Vision-Language Models

Huanyu Wang, Jushi Kai, Haoli Bai et al.

Vision-Language Models (VLMs) typically replace the predefined image placeholder token (<image>) in textual instructions with visual features from an image encoder, forming the input to a backbone Large Language Model (LLM). However, the large number of vision tokens significantly increases the context length, leading to high computational overhead and inference latency. While previous efforts mitigate this by selecting only important visual features or leveraging learnable queries to reduce token count, they often compromise performance or introduce substantial extra costs. In response, we propose Fourier-VLM, a simple yet efficient method that compresses visual representations in the frequency domain. Our approach is motivated by the observation that vision features output from the vision encoder exhibit concentrated energy in low-frequency components. Leveraging this, we apply a low-pass filter to the vision features using a two-dimensional Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT). Notably, the DCT is efficiently computed via the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) operator with a time complexity of $\mathcal{O}(n\log n)$, minimizing the extra computational cost while introducing no additional parameters. Extensive experiments across various image-based benchmarks demonstrate that Fourier-VLM achieves competitive performance with strong generalizability across both LLaVA and Qwen-VL architectures. Crucially, it reduce inference FLOPs by up to 83.8% and boots generation speed by 31.2% compared to LLaVA-v1.5, highlighting the superior efficiency and practicality.