@inproceedings{xie-wang-2026-decoupled,
    title = "Decoupled Reasoning with Implicit Fact Tokens ({DRIFT}): A Dual-Model Framework for Efficient Long-Context Inference",
    author = "Xie, Wenxuan  and
      Wang, Xuhong",
    editor = "Liakata, Maria  and
      Moreira, Viviane P.  and
      Zhang, Jiajun  and
      Jurgens, David",
    booktitle = "Findings of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics: {ACL} 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.1897/",
    pages = "38047--38067",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-395-1",
    abstract = "The integration of extensive, dynamic knowledge into Large Language Models (LLMs) remains a significant challenge due to the inherent entanglement of factual data and reasoning patterns. Existing solutions, ranging from non-parametric Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to parametric knowledge editing, are often constrained in practice by finite context windows, retriever noise, or the risk of catastrophic forgetting. In this paper, we propose \textbf{DRIFT}, a novel dual-model architecture designed to explicitly decouple knowledge extraction from the reasoning process. Unlike static prompt compression, DRIFT employs a lightweight knowledge model to dynamically compress document chunks into implicit fact tokens conditioned on the query. These dense representations are projected into the reasoning model{'}s embedding space, replacing raw, redundant text while maintaining inference accuracy. Extensive experiments show that DRIFT significantly improves performance on \textbf{long-context tasks}, outperforming strong baselines among comparably sized models. Our approach provides a scalable and efficient paradigm for extending the effective context window and reasoning capabilities of LLMs. Our code and data will be made public upon publication."
}