# LongAlign: A Recipe for Long Context Alignment of Large Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2401.18058 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.18058/

## Key facts

- Cited by 106 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in LLM preference optimization methods, one of 10 directions in LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation.
- Builds on 35 of its 50 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 31 Jan 2024.

## Placed in

- LLM alignment / RLHF / preference optimisation / [LLM preference optimization methods](https://mlsanity.com/alignment/llm-preference-optimization-methods/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 35)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Llama 2: Open Foundation and Fine-Tuned Chat Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.09288/) (2023)
- [Judging LLM-as-a-Judge with MT-Bench and Chatbot Arena](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.05685/) (2023)
- [Measuring Massive Multitask Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03300/) (2020)
- [Think you have Solved Question Answering? Try ARC, the AI2 Reasoning Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1803.05457/) (2018)
- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [HellaSwag: Can a Machine Really Finish Your Sentence?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.07830/) (2019)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [Scaling Instruction-Finetuned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.11416/) (2022)
- [TruthfulQA: Measuring How Models Mimic Human Falsehoods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2109.07958/) (2021)
- [Self-Instruct: Aligning Language Models with Self-Generated Instructions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.10560/) (2022)
- [FlashAttention-2: Faster Attention with Better Parallelism and Work Partitioning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.08691/) (2023)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17453/) (2023)
- [Megatron-LM: Training Multi-Billion Parameter Language Models Using Model Parallelism](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.08053/) (2019)
- [Mixtral of Experts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.04088/) (2024)
- [LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14508/) (2023)
- [Constructing A Multi-hop QA Dataset for Comprehensive Evaluation of Reasoning Steps](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.01060/) (2020)
- [AgentBench: Evaluating LLMs as Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.03688/) (2023)
- [GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.10360/) (2021)
- [GLM-130B: An Open Bilingual Pre-trained Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.02414/) (2022)
- [Extending Context Window of Large Language Models via Positional Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15595/) (2023)
- [YaRN: Efficient Context Window Extension of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.00071/) (2023)
- [The NarrativeQA Reading Comprehension Challenge](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1712.07040/) (2017)
- [Zephyr: Direct Distillation of LM Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.16944/) (2023)
- [LongLLMLingua: Accelerating and Enhancing LLMs in Long Context Scenarios via Prompt Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06839/) (2023)
- [How Far Can Camels Go? Exploring the State of Instruction Tuning on Open Resources](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.04751/) (2023)
- [Effective Long-Context Scaling of Foundation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16039/) (2023)
- [L-Eval: Instituting Standardized Evaluation for Long Context Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.11088/) (2023)
- [LooGLE: Can Long-Context Language Models Understand Long Contexts?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04939/) (2023)

## Built on by (most cited first, 30 of 106)

- [CogVideoX: Text-to-Video Diffusion Models with An Expert Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.06072/) (2024)
- [ChatGLM: A Family of Large Language Models from GLM-130B to GLM-4 All Tools](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.12793/) (2024)
- [Long Context Transfer from Language to Vision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.16852/) (2024)
- [BABILong: Testing the Limits of LLMs with Long Context Reasoning-in-a-Haystack](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.10149/) (2024)
- [MMLongBench-Doc: Benchmarking Long-context Document Understanding with Visualizations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01523/) (2024)
- [Qwen2.5-1M Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.15383/) (2025)
- [How to Train Long-Context Language Models (Effectively)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02660/) (2024)
- [LongWriter: Unleashing 10,000+ Word Generation from Long Context LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07055/) (2024)
- [DFlash: Block Diffusion for Flash Speculative Decoding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.06036/) (2026)
- [Deep Research Agents: A Systematic Examination And Roadmap](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.18096/) (2025)
- [Context Length Alone Hurts LLM Performance Despite Perfect Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.05381/) (2025)
- [Make Your LLM Fully Utilize the Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.16811/) (2024)
- [M3DocRAG: Multi-modal Retrieval is What You Need for Multi-page Multi-document Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04952/) (2024)
- [LongCite: Enabling LLMs to Generate Fine-grained Citations in Long-context QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02897/) (2024)
- [Eagle 2.5: Boosting Long-Context Post-Training for Frontier Vision-Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.15271/) (2025)
- [Why Does the Effective Context Length of LLMs Fall Short?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18745/) (2024)
- [SelfCodeAlign: Self-Alignment for Code Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.24198/) (2024)
- [Can Long-Context Language Models Subsume Retrieval, RAG, SQL, and More?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.13121/) (2024)
- [Forgetting Transformer: Softmax Attention with a Forget Gate](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.02130/) (2025)
- [MiniCPM4: Ultra-Efficient LLMs on End Devices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.07900/) (2025)
- [LongRAG: A Dual-Perspective Retrieval-Augmented Generation Paradigm for Long-Context Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18050/) (2024)
- [Challenges in Deploying Long-Context Transformers: A Theoretical Peak Performance Analysis](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.08944/) (2024)
- [Long-VITA: Scaling Large Multi-modal Models to 1 Million Tokens with Leading Short-Context Accuracy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05177/) (2025)
- [LongReward: Improving Long-context Large Language Models with AI Feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.21252/) (2024)
- [NovelQA: Benchmarking Question Answering on Documents Exceeding 200K Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12766/) (2024)
- [VITA-Audio: Fast Interleaved Cross-Modal Token Generation for Efficient Large Speech-Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.03739/) (2025)
- [Large Language Models Can Self-Improve in Long-context Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.08147/) (2024)
- [LongPO: Long Context Self-Evolution of Large Language Models through Short-to-Long Preference Optimization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.13922/) (2025)
- [Long Context Alignment with Short Instructions and Synthesized Positions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.03939/) (2024)
- [Issue Localization via LLM-Driven Iterative Code Graph Searching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.22424/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Extending large language models to effectively handle long contexts requires instruction fine-tuning on input sequences of similar length. To address this, we present LongAlign -- a recipe of the instruction data, training, and evaluation for long context alignment. First, we construct a long instruction-following dataset using Self-Instruct. To ensure the data diversity, it covers a broad range of tasks from various long context sources. Second, we adopt the packing and sorted batching strategies to speed up supervised fine-tuning on data with varied length distributions. Additionally, we develop a loss weighting method to balance the contribution to the loss across different sequences during packing training. Third, we introduce the LongBench-Chat benchmark for evaluating instruction-following capabilities on queries of 10k-100k in length. Experiments show that LongAlign outperforms existing recipes for LLMs in long context tasks by up to 30%, while also maintaining their proficiency in handling short, generic tasks. The code, data, and long-aligned models are open-sourced at https://github.com/THUDM/LongAlign.