Discovering the Gems in Early Layers: Accelerating Long-Context LLMs with 1000x Input Token Reduction

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable capabilities in handling long context inputs, but this comes at the cost of increased computational resources and latency. Our research introduces a novel approach for the long context bottleneck to accelerate LLM inference and reduce GPU memory consumption. We show that LLMs can identify relevant tokens in the early layers prior to generating query responses. Leveraging this insight, we propose an algorithm that uses early layers of an LLM as filters to select and compress input tokens, significantly reducing the context length for subsequent processing. Our method, GemFilter, demonstrates substantial improvements in both speed and memory efficiency compared to existing techniques, such as standard attention and SnapKV/H2O. Notably, it achieves a 2.4× speedup and 30% reduction in GPU memory usage compared to SOTA methods. When evaluated on the Needle in a Haystack task, GemFilter significantly outperforms standard attention and SnapKV, while demonstrating comparable performance on the LongBench challenge. GemFilter is simple, training-free, and broadly applicable across different LLMs. Moreover, it provides interpretability by allowing humans to inspect the selected input sequence. Our findings provide practical benefits for deploying LLMs and deepen our understanding of their internal mechanisms, paving the way for further optimizations in LLM design and inference. Our code is available at https://github.com/ SalesforceAIResearch/GemFilter.