Efficient OpAmp Adaptation for Zoom Attention to Golden Contexts

Haoyuan Wu, Rui Ming, Haisheng Zheng, Zhuolun He, Bei Yu


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have shown significant promise in question-answering (QA) tasks, particularly in retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) scenarios and long-context applications. However, their performance is hindered by noisy reference documents, which often distract from essential information. Despite fine-tuning efforts, Transformer-based architectures struggle to prioritize relevant content. This is evidenced by their tendency to allocate disproportionate attention to irrelevant or later-positioned documents. Recent work proposes the differential attention mechanism to address this issue, but this mechanism is limited by an unsuitable common-mode rejection ratio (CMRR) and high computational costs. Inspired by the operational amplifier (OpAmp), we propose the OpAmp adaptation to address these challenges, which is implemented with adapters efficiently. By integrating the adapter into pre-trained Transformer blocks, our approach enhances focus on the golden context without costly training from scratch. Empirical evaluations on noisy-context benchmarks reveal that our Qwen2.5-OpAmp-72B model, trained with our OpAmp adaptation, surpasses the performance of state-of-the-art LLMs, including DeepSeek-V3 and GPT-4o.Our code is available at https://github.com/wuhy68/OpampAdapter.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.653
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
13319–13331
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.653/
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Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Haoyuan Wu, Rui Ming, Haisheng Zheng, Zhuolun He, and Bei Yu. 2025. Efficient OpAmp Adaptation for Zoom Attention to Golden Contexts. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 13319–13331, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Efficient OpAmp Adaptation for Zoom Attention to Golden Contexts (Wu et al., ACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.653.pdf