LLoCO: Learning Long Contexts Offline
<|reference_start|>LLoCO: Learning Long Contexts Offline: Processing long contexts remains a challenge for large language models (LLMs) due to the quadratic computational and memory overhead of the self-attention mechanism and the substantial KV cache sizes during generation. We propose a novel approach to address this problem by learning contexts offline through context compression and in-domain parameter-efficient finetuning. Our method enables an LLM to create a concise representation of the original context and efficiently retrieve relevant information to answer questions accurately. We introduce LLoCO, a technique that combines context compression, retrieval, and parameter-efficient finetuning using LoRA. Our approach extends the effective context window of a 4k token LLaMA2-7B model to handle up to 128k tokens. We evaluate our approach on several long-context question-answering datasets, demonstrating that LLoCO significantly outperforms in-context learning while using $30\times$ fewer tokens during inference. LLoCO achieves up to $7.62\times$ speed-up and substantially reduces the cost of long document question answering, making it a promising solution for efficient long context processing. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/jeffreysijuntan/lloco.<|reference_end|>
@article{tan2024lloco:,
    title={LLoCO: Learning Long Contexts Offline},
    author={Sijun Tan, Xiuyu Li, Shishir Patil, Ziyang Wu, Tianjun Zhang, Kurt
  Keutzer, Joseph E. Gonzalez, Raluca Ada Popa},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2404.07979},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2404.07979},
    primaryClass={cs.CL cs.AI cs.LG}
}