arXiv · 2603.20843
HiCI: Hierarchical Construction-Integration for Long-Context Attention
Abstract
Long-context language modeling is commonly framed as a scalability challenge of token-level attention, yet local-to-global information structuring remains largely implicit in existing approaches. Drawing on cognitive theories of discourse comprehension, we propose HiCI (Hierarchical Construction--Integration), a hierarchical attention module that constructs segment-level representations, integrates them into a shared global context, and broadcasts both to condition segment-level attention. We validate HiCI through parameter-efficient adaptation of LLaMA-2 with only <5.5% additional parameters, extending context from 4K to 100K tokens (7B) and 64K tokens (13B). Across language modeling, retrieval, and instruction-following benchmarks, HiCI yields consistent improvements over strong baselines, including matching proprietary models on topic retrieval and surpassing GPT-3.5-Turbo-16K on code comprehension. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of explicit hierarchical structuring as an inductive bias for long-context modeling.
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Xiangyu Zeng, Qi Xu, Yunke Wang, Chang Xu. 2026-03-21. HiCI: Hierarchical Construction-Integration for Long-Context Attention. https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.20843
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