Smooth Reading: Bridging the Gap of Recurrent LLM to Self-Attention LLM on Long-Context Understanding

Recently, recurrent large language models (Recurrent LLMs) with linear computational complexity have re-emerged as efficient alternatives to self-attention-based LLMs (Self-Attention LLMs), which have quadratic complexity. However, Recurrent LLMs often underperform on long-context tasks due to their limited fixed-size memory. Previous research has primarily focused on enhancing the memory capacity of Recurrent LLMs through architectural innovations, but these approaches have not yet enabled Recurrent LLMs to match the performance of Self-Attention LLMs on long-context tasks. We argue that this limitation arises because processing the entire context at once is not well-suited for Recurrent LLMs. In this paper, we propose Smooth Reading, a chunk-wise inference method inspired by human reading strategies. Smooth Reading processes context in chunks and iteratively summarizes the contextual information, thereby reducing memory demands and making the approach more compatible with Recurrent LLMs. Our experimental results show that this method substantially narrows the performance gap between Recurrent and Self-Attention LLMs on long-context tasks, while preserving the efficiency advantages of Recurrent LLMs. Our Smooth Reading boosts SWA-3B-4k (a Recurrent LLM) from 5.68% lower to 3.61% higher performance than Self-Attention LLMs on LongBench. Besides, our method maintains the high efficiency, training 3× faster and inferring 2× faster at 64k context compared to Self-Attention LLMs. To our knowledge, this is the first work to achieve comparable performance using Recurrent LLMs compared with Self-Attention LLMs on long-context tasks. We hope our method will inspire future research in this area. To facilitate further progress, we will release code and dataset.