Introducing "Writing in the Margins (WiM)" - better infer... | Introducing "Writing in the Margins (WiM)" - better infer...
Introducing "Writing in the Margins (WiM)" - better inference pattern for long context LLMs that solves the Lost-in-the-Middle problem 🔥

Paper page:
Writing in the Margins: Better Inference Pattern for Long Context Retrieval (2408.14906)


TL;DR
Make your model write "margin notes" as you chunk prefill the KV cache. Then ask it reread all notes before it speaks up.
Works with humans, works with AI 🤖

WiM leverages the chunked prefill of the key-value cache, which concurrently generates query-based extractive summaries at each step of the prefill that are subsequently reintegrated at the end of the computation. We term these intermediate outputs “margins”, drawing inspiration from the practice of making margin notes for improved comprehension of long contexts in human reading. We show that this technique, which adds only minimal additional computation, significantly improves LLMs long context reasoning capabilities.

Think: Every chunk has a chance to be attended to/ be at the end of the context at least once. 🎉

đź“Š Results:
- An average accuracy boost of 7.5% in multi-hop reasoning tasks like HotpotQA and MultiHop-RAG.
- Even a 30% increase in F1-score for summarisation-like tasks (CWE).

Plus, WiM fits seamlessly into interactive applications (think: progress bar!). It can provide real-time progress updates during data retrieval and integration, making it user-friendly and transparent - a stark contrast to feeding 1mln tokens to an LLMs and waiting 6 min for the first token. 🤯

👩‍💻🧑‍💻 Check it out and contribute to our open-source project here: https://github.com/writer/writing-in-the-margins

🧠 More about chunked prefill: https://docs.vllm.ai/en/latest/models/performance.html#chunked-prefill GitHub - writer/writing-in-the-margins