Efficient processing of long contexts has been a persistent pursuit in Natural Language Processing. With the growing number of long documents, dialogues, and other textual data, it is important to develop Long Context Language Models (LCLMs) that can process and analyze extensive inputs in an effective and efficient way. In this paper, we present a comprehensive survey on recent advances in long-context modeling for large language models. Our survey is structured around three key aspects: how to obtain effective and efficient LCLMs, how to train and deploy LCLMs efficiently, and how to evaluate and analyze LCLMs comprehensively. For the first aspect, we discuss data strategies, architectural designs, and workflow approaches oriented with long context processing. For the second aspect, we provide a detailed examination of the infrastructure required for LCLM training and inference. For the third aspect, we present evaluation paradigms for long-context comprehension and long-form generation, as well as behavioral analysis and mechanism interpretability of LCLMs. Beyond these three key aspects, we thoroughly explore the diverse application scenarios where existing LCLMs have been deployed and outline promising future development directions. This survey provides an up-to-date review of the literature on long-context LLMs, which we wish to serve as a valuable resource for both researchers and engineers. An associated GitHub repository collecting the latest papers and repos is available at: \href{https://github.com/LCLM-Horizon/A-Comprehensive-Survey-For-Long-Context-Language-Modeling}{\color[RGB]{175,36,67}{LCLM-Horizon}}.

We rigorously establish a bipartite mutual information scaling law in natural language that governs long-range dependencies. This scaling law, which we show is distinct from and scales independently of the conventional two-point mutual information, is the key to understanding long-context language modeling. Using this scaling law, we formulate the Long-context Language Modeling (L$^2$M) condition, which relates a model's capacity for effective long context length modeling to the scaling of its latent state size for storing past information. Our results are validated through experiments on both transformers and state space models. This work establishes a theoretical foundation that guides the development of large language models toward longer context lengths.

Robotic tactile sensors, including vision-based and taxel-based sensors, enable agile manipulation and safe human-robot interaction through force sensation. However, variations in structural configurations, measured signals, and material properties create domain gaps that limit the transferability of learned force sensation across different tactile sensors. Here, we introduce GenForce, a general framework for achieving transferable force sensation across both homogeneous and heterogeneous tactile sensors in robotic systems. By unifying tactile signals into marker-based binary tactile images, GenForce enables the transfer of existing force labels to arbitrary target sensors using a marker-to-marker translation technique with a few paired data. This process equips uncalibrated tactile sensors with force prediction capabilities through spatiotemporal force prediction models trained on the transferred data. Extensive experimental results validate GenForce's generalizability, accuracy, and robustness across sensors with diverse marker patterns, structural designs, material properties, and sensing principles. The framework significantly reduces the need for costly and labor-intensive labeled data collection, enabling the rapid deployment of multiple tactile sensors on robotic hands requiring force sensing capabilities.

By locally encoding raw data into intermediate features, collaborative inference enables end users to leverage powerful deep learning models without exposure of sensitive raw data to cloud servers. However, recent studies have revealed that these intermediate features may not sufficiently preserve privacy, as information can be leaked and raw data can be reconstructed via model inversion attacks (MIAs). Obfuscation-based methods, such as noise corruption, adversarial representation learning, and information filters, enhance the inversion robustness by obfuscating the task-irrelevant redundancy empirically. However, methods for quantifying such redundancy remain elusive, and the explicit mathematical relation between this redundancy minimization and inversion robustness enhancement has not yet been established. To address that, this work first theoretically proves that the conditional entropy of inputs given intermediate features provides a guaranteed lower bound on the reconstruction mean square error (MSE) under any MIA. Then, we derive a differentiable and solvable measure for bounding this conditional entropy based on the Gaussian mixture estimation and propose a conditional entropy maximization (CEM) algorithm to enhance the inversion robustness. Experimental results on four datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and adaptability of our proposed CEM; without compromising feature utility and computing efficiency, plugging the proposed CEM into obfuscation-based defense mechanisms consistently boosts their inversion robustness, achieving average gains ranging from 12.9\% to 48.2\%. Code is available at \href{https://github.com/xiasong0501/CEM}{https://github.com/xiasong0501/CEM}.

Despite the advancements made in Visual Large Language Models (VLLMs), like text Large Language Models (LLMs), they have limitations in addressing questions that require real-time information or are knowledge-intensive. Indiscriminately adopting Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) techniques is an effective yet expensive way to enable models to answer queries beyond their knowledge scopes. To mitigate the dependence on retrieval and simultaneously maintain, or even improve, the performance benefits provided by retrieval, we propose a method to detect the knowledge boundary of VLLMs, allowing for more efficient use of techniques like RAG. Specifically, we propose a method with two variants that fine-tunes a VLLM on an automatically constructed dataset for boundary identification. Experimental results on various types of Visual Question Answering datasets show that our method successfully depicts a VLLM's knowledge boundary based on which we are able to reduce indiscriminate retrieval while maintaining or improving the performance. In addition, we show that the knowledge boundary identified by our method for one VLLM can be used as a surrogate boundary for other VLLMs. Code will be released at https://github.com/Chord-Chen-30/VLLM-KnowledgeBoundary

Several recent studies have attempted to autoregressively generate continuous speech representations without discrete speech tokens by combining diffusion and autoregressive models, yet they often face challenges with excessive computational loads or suboptimal outcomes. In this work, we propose Diffusion Transformer Autoregressive Modeling (DiTAR), a patch-based autoregressive framework combining a language model with a diffusion transformer. This approach significantly enhances the efficacy of autoregressive models for continuous tokens and reduces computational demands. DiTAR utilizes a divide-and-conquer strategy for patch generation, where the language model processes aggregated patch embeddings and the diffusion transformer subsequently generates the next patch based on the output of the language model. For inference, we propose defining temperature as the time point of introducing noise during the reverse diffusion ODE to balance diversity and determinism. We also show in the extensive scaling analysis that DiTAR has superb scalability. In zero-shot speech generation, DiTAR achieves state-of-the-art performance in robustness, speaker similarity, and naturalness.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have significantly improved various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. Typically, LLMs are trained to predict the next token, aligning well with many NLP tasks. However, in knowledge graph (KG) scenarios, entities are the fundamental units and identifying an entity requires at least several tokens. This leads to a granularity mismatch between KGs and natural languages. To address this issue, we propose K-ON, which integrates KG knowledge into the LLM by employing multiple head layers for next k-step prediction. K-ON can not only generate entity-level results in one step, but also enables contrastive loss against entities, which is the most powerful tool in KG representation learning. Experimental results show that K-ON outperforms state-of-the-art methods that incorporate text and even the other modalities.

Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) systems based on Large Language Models (LLMs) have become essential for tasks such as question answering and content generation. However, their increasing impact on public opinion and information dissemination has made them a critical focus for security research due to inherent vulnerabilities. Previous studies have predominantly addressed attacks targeting factual or single-query manipulations. In this paper, we address a more practical scenario: topic-oriented adversarial opinion manipulation attacks on RAG models, where LLMs are required to reason and synthesize multiple perspectives, rendering them particularly susceptible to systematic knowledge poisoning. Specifically, we propose Topic-FlipRAG, a two-stage manipulation attack pipeline that strategically crafts adversarial perturbations to influence opinions across related queries. This approach combines traditional adversarial ranking attack techniques and leverages the extensive internal relevant knowledge and reasoning capabilities of LLMs to execute semantic-level perturbations. Experiments show that the proposed attacks effectively shift the opinion of the model's outputs on specific topics, significantly impacting user information perception. Current mitigation methods cannot effectively defend against such attacks, highlighting the necessity for enhanced safeguards for RAG systems, and offering crucial insights for LLM security research.

Large Audio-Language Models (LALMs) have demonstrated remarkable performance in tasks involving audio perception and understanding, such as speech recognition and audio captioning. However, their reasoning capabilities - critical for solving complex real-world problems - remain underexplored. In this work, we conduct the first exploration into integrating Chain-of-Thought (CoT) reasoning into LALMs to enhance their reasoning ability across auditory modalities. We evaluate representative CoT methods, analyzing their performance in both information extraction and reasoning tasks across sound, music, and speech domains. Our findings reveal that CoT methods significantly improve performance on easy and medium tasks but encounter challenges with hard tasks, where reasoning chains can confuse the model rather than improve accuracy. Additionally, we identify a positive correlation between reasoning path length and accuracy, demonstrating the potential of scaling inference for advanced instruction-following and reasoning. This study not only highlights the promise of CoT in enhancing LALM reasoning capabilities but also identifies key limitations and provides actionable directions for future research.

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional performance in text generation within current NLP research. However, the lack of factual accuracy is still a dark cloud hanging over the LLM skyscraper. Structural knowledge prompting (SKP) is a prominent paradigm to integrate external knowledge into LLMs by incorporating structural representations, achieving state-of-the-art results in many knowledge-intensive tasks. However, existing methods often focus on specific problems, lacking a comprehensive exploration of the generalization and capability boundaries of SKP. This paper aims to evaluate and rethink the generalization capability of the SKP paradigm from four perspectives including Granularity, Transferability, Scalability, and Universality. To provide a thorough evaluation, we introduce a novel multi-granular, multi-level benchmark called SUBARU, consisting of 9 different tasks with varying levels of granularity and difficulty.