Adapting LLMs for Efficient Context Processing through Soft Prompt
  Compression
Cangqing Wang Yutian Yang Ruisi Li Dan Sun Ruicong Cai Yuzhu Zhang Chengqian Fu Lillian Floyd
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) has inaugurated a
transformative epoch in natural language processing, fostering unprecedented
proficiency in text generation, comprehension, and contextual scrutiny.
Nevertheless, effectively handling extensive contexts, crucial for myriad
applications, poses a formidable obstacle owing to the intrinsic constraints of
the models' context window sizes and the computational burdens entailed by
their operations. This investigation presents an innovative framework that
strategically tailors LLMs for streamlined context processing by harnessing the
synergies among natural language summarization, soft prompt compression, and
augmented utility preservation mechanisms. Our methodology, dubbed
SoftPromptComp, amalgamates natural language prompts extracted from
summarization methodologies with dynamically generated soft prompts to forge a
concise yet semantically robust depiction of protracted contexts. This
depiction undergoes further refinement via a weighting mechanism optimizing
information retention and utility for subsequent tasks. We substantiate that
our framework markedly diminishes computational overhead and enhances LLMs'
efficacy across various benchmarks, while upholding or even augmenting the
caliber of the produced content. By amalgamating soft prompt compression with
sophisticated summarization, SoftPromptComp confronts the dual challenges of
managing lengthy contexts and ensuring model scalability. Our findings point
towards a propitious trajectory for augmenting LLMs' applicability and
efficiency, rendering them more versatile and pragmatic for real-world
applications. This research enriches the ongoing discourse on optimizing
language models, providing insights into the potency of soft prompts and
summarization techniques as pivotal instruments for the forthcoming generation
of NLP solutions.