Wai Lam

Siheng Li, Cheng Yang, Zesen Cheng et al.

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved substantial progress in processing long contexts but still struggle with long-context reasoning. Existing approaches typically involve fine-tuning LLMs with synthetic data, which depends on annotations from human experts or advanced models like GPT-4, thus restricting further advancements. To address this issue, we investigate the potential for LLMs to self-improve in long-context reasoning and propose \ours, an approach specifically designed for this purpose. This approach is straightforward: we sample multiple outputs for each question, score them with Minimum Bayes Risk, and then apply supervised fine-tuning or preference optimization based on these outputs. Extensive experiments on several leading LLMs demonstrate the effectiveness of \ours, with an absolute improvement of $4.2$ points for Llama-3.1-8B-Instruct. Furthermore, \ours achieves superior performance compared to prior approaches that depend on data produced by human experts or advanced models. We anticipate that this work will open new avenues for self-improvement techniques in long-context scenarios, which are essential for the continual advancement of LLMs.

Bowen Cao, Deng Cai, Wai Lam

In-context learning (ICL) is critical for large language models (LLMs), but its effectiveness is constrained by finite context windows, particularly in ultra-long contexts. To overcome this, we introduce InfiniteICL, a framework that parallels context and parameters in LLMs with short- and long-term memory in human cognitive systems, focusing on transforming temporary context knowledge into permanent parameter updates. This approach significantly reduces memory usage, maintains robust performance across varying input lengths, and theoretically enables infinite context integration through the principles of context knowledge elicitation, selection, and consolidation. Evaluations demonstrate that our method reduces context length by 90% while achieving 103% average performance of full-context prompting across fact recall, grounded reasoning, and skill acquisition tasks. When conducting sequential multi-turn transformations on complex, real-world contexts (with length up to 2M tokens), our approach surpasses full-context prompting while using only 0.4% of the original contexts. These findings highlight InfiniteICL's potential to enhance the scalability and efficiency of LLMs by breaking the limitations of conventional context window sizes.