Attention Sorting Combats Recency Bias In Long Context Language Models
Alexander Peysakhovich Adam Lerer
Current language models often fail to incorporate long contexts efficiently
during generation. We show that a major contributor to this issue are attention
priors that are likely learned during pre-training: relevant information
located earlier in context is attended to less on average. Yet even when models
fail to use the information from a relevant document in their response, they
still pay preferential attention to that document compared to an irrelevant
document at the same position. We leverage this fact to introduce ``attention
sorting'': perform one step of decoding, sort documents by the attention they
receive (highest attention going last), repeat the process, generate the answer
with the newly sorted context. We find that attention sorting improves
performance of long context models. Our findings highlight some challenges in
using off-the-shelf language models for retrieval augmented generation.