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Dynamic Prompt Compression for Efficient Inference of Large Language Models
DOI:10.1109/TKDE.2026.3669558.png)
Abstract
En 中文
Large language models (LLMs) have shown outstanding performance across a variety of tasks, partly due to advanced prompting techniques. However, these techniques often require lengthy prompts, which increase computational costs and can hinder performance because of the limited context windows of LLMs. While prompt compression is a straightforward solution, existing methods confront the challenges of retaining essential information, adapting to context changes, and remaining effective across different tasks. To tackle these issues, we propose a task-agnostic method called Dynamic Prompt Compression (LLM-DPC). Our method reduces the number of prompt tokens while minimizing any degradation in LLM performance. We model prompt compression as a Markov Decision Process (MDP), enabling the DPC-Agent to sequentially remove redundant tokens by adapting to dynamic contexts and retaining crucial content. We develop a reward function for training the DPC-Agent that balances the compression ratio, the quality of the LLM output, and the retention of key information. This allows for prompt token reduction without needing an external black-box LLM. Inspired by the progressive difficulty adjustment in curriculum learning, we introduce a Hierarchical Prompt Compression (HPC) training strategy that gradually increases the compression difficulty, enabling the DPC-Agent to learn an effective compression method that maintains information integrity. Experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms state-of-the-art techniques, especially at higher compression ratio.
Keywords:
Large language models (LLMs)
prompt compression
Markov decision process (MDP)
curriculum learning
Journal
IF:
10.4
Papers:
6.7K
Citations:
3.2W

