DAC: A Dynamic Attention-aware Approach for Task-Agnostic Prompt Compression

Yi Zhao, Zuchao Li, Hai Zhao, Baoyuan Qi, Liu Guoming


Abstract
Task-agnostic prompt compression leverages the redundancy in natural language to reduce computational overhead and enhance information density within prompts, especially in long-context scenarios. Existing methods predominantly rely on information entropy as the metric to compress lexical units, aiming to achieve minimal information loss. However, these approaches overlook two critical aspects: (i) the importance of attention-critical tokens at the algorithmic level, and (ii) shifts in information entropy during the compression process. Motivated by these challenges, we propose a dynamic attention-aware approach for task-agnostic prompt compression (DAC). This approach effectively integrates entropy and attention information, dynamically sensing entropy shifts during compression to achieve fine-grained prompt compression. Extensive experiments across various domains, including LongBench, GSM8K, and BBH, show that DAC consistently yields robust and substantial improvements across a diverse range of tasks and LLMs, offering compelling evidence of its efficacy.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.952
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:
19395–19407
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.952/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yi Zhao, Zuchao Li, Hai Zhao, Baoyuan Qi, and Liu Guoming. 2025. DAC: A Dynamic Attention-aware Approach for Task-Agnostic Prompt Compression. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 19395–19407, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DAC: A Dynamic Attention-aware Approach for Task-Agnostic Prompt Compression (Zhao et al., ACL 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.952.pdf