Computer Science > Computation and Language

Title:LinearARD: Linear-Memory Attention Distillation for RoPE Restoration

View PDF HTML (experimental)Abstract:The extension of context windows in Large Language Models is typically facilitated by scaling positional encodings followed by lightweight Continual Pre-Training (CPT). While effective for processing long sequences, this paradigm often disrupts original model capabilities, leading to performance degradation on standard short-text benchmarks. We propose LinearARD, a self-distillation method that restores Rotary Position Embeddings (RoPE)-scaled students through attention-structure consistency with a frozen native-RoPE teacher. Rather than matching opaque hidden states, LinearARD aligns the row-wise distributions of dense $Q/Q$, $K/K$, and $V/V$ self-relation matrices to directly supervise attention dynamics. To overcome the quadratic memory bottleneck of $n \times n$ relation maps, we introduce a linear-memory kernel. This kernel leverages per-token log-sum-exp statistics and fuses logit recomputation into the backward pass to compute exact Kullback-Leibler divergence and gradients. On LLaMA2-7B extended from 4K to 32K, LinearARD recovers 98.3% of the short-text performance of state-of-the-art baselines while surpassing them on long-context benchmarks. Notably, our method achieves these results using only 4.25M training tokens compared to the 256M tokens required by LongReD and CPT. Our code is available at this https URL.

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