# LOCOST: State-Space Models for Long Document Abstractive Summarization

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.17919 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.17919/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 30 of its 41 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jan 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 30)

- [Attention Is All You Need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1706.03762/) (2017)
- [BERT: Pre-training of Deep Bidirectional Transformers for Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1810.04805/) (2018)
- [PyTorch: An Imperative Style, High-Performance Deep Learning Library](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.01703/) (2019)
- [Exploring the Limits of Transfer Learning with a Unified Text-to-Text Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.10683/) (2019)
- [BART: Denoising Sequence-to-Sequence Pre-training for Natural Language Generation, Translation, and Comprehension](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.13461/) (2019)
- [BERTScore: Evaluating Text Generation with BERT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09675/) (2019)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Transformers are RNNs: Fast Autoregressive Transformers with Linear Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.16236/) (2020)
- [GLU Variants Improve Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.05202/) (2020)
- [Generating Long Sequences with Sparse Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.10509/) (2019)
- [Improving language models by retrieving from trillions of tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.04426/) (2021)
- [PEGASUS: Pre-training with Extracted Gap-sentences for Abstractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1912.08777/) (2019)
- [ChatGPT Outperforms Crowd-Workers for Text-Annotation Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.15056/) (2023)
- [Can Large Language Models Be an Alternative to Human Evaluations?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.01937/) (2023)
- [Long Range Arena: A Benchmark for Efficient Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04006/) (2020)
- [HiPPO: Recurrent Memory with Optimal Polynomial Projections](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.07669/) (2020)
- [Documenting Large Webtext Corpora: A Case Study on the Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.08758/) (2021)
- [A Discourse-Aware Attention Model for Abstractive Summarization of Long Documents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.05685/) (2018)
- [Pay Attention to MLPs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08050/) (2021)
- [FNet: Mixing Tokens with Fourier Transforms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.03824/) (2021)
- [Efficient Attentions for Long Document Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.02112/) (2021)
- [LongT5: Efficient Text-To-Text Transformer for Long Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.07916/) (2021)
- [BookSum: A Collection of Datasets for Long-form Narrative Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08209/) (2021)
- [SCROLLS: Standardized CompaRison Over Long Language Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03533/) (2022)
- [Fill in the BLANC: Human-free quality estimation of document summaries](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.09836/) (2020)
- [What's in the Box? A Preliminary Analysis of Undesirable Content in the Common Crawl Corpus](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.02732/) (2021)
- [Pretraining Without Attention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10544/) (2022)
- [Investigating Efficiently Extending Transformers for Long Input Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2208.04347/) (2022)
- [Efficient Long Sequence Modeling via State Space Augmented Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.08136/) (2022)

## Built on by (most cited first, 8 of 8)

- [State Space Model for New-Generation Network Alternative to Transformers: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.09516/) (2024)
- [A Survey of Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.01129/) (2024)
- [Context Engineering 2.0: The Context of Context Engineering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.26493/) (2025)
- [GraphLSS: Integrating Lexical, Structural, and Semantic Features for Long Document Extractive Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21315/) (2024)
- [CodeSSM: Towards State Space Models for Code Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.01475/) (2025)
- [Technologies on Effectiveness and Efficiency: A Survey of State Spaces Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.11224/) (2025)
- [Venturing into Uncharted Waters: The Navigation Compass from Transformer to Mamba](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16722/) (2024)
- [Graph Mamba Survival Analysis Based on Topology-Aware ordering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.02602/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

State-space models are a low-complexity alternative to transformers for encoding long sequences and capturing long-term dependencies. We propose LOCOST: an encoder-decoder architecture based on state-space models for conditional text generation with long context inputs. With a computational complexity of O(L log L), this architecture can handle significantly longer sequences than state-of-the-art models that are based on sparse attention patterns. We evaluate our model on a series of long document abstractive summarization tasks. The model reaches a performance level that is 93-96% comparable to the top-performing sparse transformers of the same size while saving up to 50% memory during training and up to 87% during inference. Additionally, LOCOST effectively handles input texts exceeding 600K tokens at inference time, setting new state-of-the-art results on full-book summarization and opening new perspectives for long input processing.