FocusLLM: Scaling LLM's Context by Parallel Decoding
Empowering LLMs with the ability to utilize useful information from a long
context is crucial for many downstream applications. However, achieving long
context lengths with the conventional transformer architecture requires
substantial training and inference resources. In this paper, we present
FocusLLM, a framework designed to extend the context length of any decoder-only
LLM, enabling the model to focus on relevant information from very long
sequences. FocusLLM processes long text inputs by dividing them into chunks
based on the model's original context length to alleviate the issue of
attention distraction. Then, it appends the local context to each chunk as a
prompt to extract essential information from each chunk based on a novel
parallel decoding mechanism, and ultimately integrates the extracted
information into the local context. FocusLLM stands out for great training
efficiency and versatility: trained with an 8K input length with much less
training cost than previous methods, FocusLLM exhibits superior performance
across downstream long-context tasks and maintains strong language modeling
ability when handling extensive long texts, even up to 400K tokens. Our code is
available at https://github.com/leezythu/FocusLLM.
66c6a8c20f390b546ae64da2
Zhenyu Li
66c6a8c20f390b546ae64da3
Yike Zhang
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2025-08-06T19:46:10.871Z
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zhangyik21
user
zhangyik21
66c6a8c20f390b546ae64da4
Tengyu Pan
66c6a8c20f390b546ae64da5
Yutao Sun
66c6a8c20f390b546ae64da6
Zhichao Duan
66c6a8c20f390b546ae64da7
Junjie Fang
66c6a8c20f390b546ae64da8
Rong Han
66c6a8c20f390b546ae64da9
Zixuan Wang
66c6a8c20f390b546ae64daa
Jianyong Wang
FocusLLM: Scaling LLM's Context by Parallel Decoding
Empowering LLMs with the ability to utilize useful information from a long
context is crucial for many downstream applications. However, achieving long
context lengths with the conventional transformer architecture requires
substantial training and inference resources. In this paper, we present
FocusLLM, a framework designed to extend the context length of any decoder-only
LLM, enabling the model to focus on relevant information from very long
sequences. FocusLLM processes long text inputs by dividing them into chunks
based on the model's original context length to alleviate the issue of
attention distraction. Then, it appends the local context to each chunk as a
prompt to extract essential information from each chunk based on a novel
parallel decoding mechanism, and ultimately integrates the extracted
information into the local context. FocusLLM stands out for great training
efficiency and versatility: trained with an 8K input length with much less
training cost than previous methods, FocusLLM exhibits superior performance
across downstream long-context tasks and maintains strong language modeling
ability when handling extensive long texts, even up to 400K tokens. Our code is
available at https://github.com/leezythu/FocusLLM.
FocusLLM extends the context length of decoder-only LLMs efficiently by chunking long texts and using a parallel decoding mechanism to enhance performance on long-context tasks.
LLMs decoder-only context length attention distraction parallel decoding机制 language modeling ability