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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.11942 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.11942/

## Key facts

- Cited by 7 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Placed in Prompt and context compression, one of 12 directions in Efficient LLM inference and serving.
- Builds on 20 of its 25 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 16 Jul 2025.

## Placed in

- Efficient LLM inference and serving / [Prompt and context compression](https://mlsanity.com/inference/prompt-and-context-compression/)

## Builds on (most cited first, 20 of 20)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09261/) (2022)
- [The Rise and Potential of Large Language Model Based Agents: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.07864/) (2023)
- [LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14508/) (2023)
- [AWQ: Activation-aware Weight Quantization for LLM Compression and Acceleration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.00978/) (2023)
- [A Survey on In-context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.00234/) (2022)
- [LongLLMLingua: Accelerating and Enhancing LLMs in Long Context Scenarios via Prompt Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06839/) (2023)
- [Scissorhands: Exploiting the Persistence of Importance Hypothesis for LLM KV Cache Compression at Test Time](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.17118/) (2023)
- [Learning to Compress Prompts with Gist Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08467/) (2023)
- [LLMLingua-2: Data Distillation for Efficient and Faithful Task-Agnostic Prompt Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12968/) (2024)
- [RECOMP: Improving Retrieval-Augmented LMs with Compression and Selective Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.04408/) (2023)
- [PyramidInfer: Pyramid KV Cache Compression for High-throughput LLM Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.12532/) (2024)
- [You Only Cache Once: Decoder-Decoder Architectures for Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.05254/) (2024)
- [Prompt Compression and Contrastive Conditioning for Controllability and Toxicity Reduction in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.03162/) (2022)
- [Keep the Cost Down: A Review on Methods to Optimize LLM' s KV-Cache Consumption](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18003/) (2024)
- [Igniting Language Intelligence: The Hitchhiker's Guide From Chain-of-Thought Reasoning to Language Agents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.11797/) (2023)
- [Discrete Prompt Compression with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.08758/) (2023)
- [KVSharer: Efficient Inference via Layer-Wise Dissimilar KV Cache Sharing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18517/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [CompLLM: Compression for Long Context Q&A](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.19228/) (2025)
- [Scaling LLM Speculative Decoding: Non-Autoregressive Forecasting in Large-Batch Scenarios](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.20340/) (2025)
- [End-to-end Contrastive Language-Speech Pretraining Model For Long-form Spoken Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.09282/) (2025)
- [POP: Prefill-Only Pruning for Efficient Large Model Inference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.03295/) (2026)
- [Cmprsr: Abstractive Token-Level Question-Agnostic Prompt Compressor](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.12281/) (2025)
- [Relevant but Incomplete: Referential Dangling as a Paradigm-Level Failure Mode in Hard Prompt Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.04569/) (2026)
- [Compression Beyond the Uncompressed: A Two-Stage Training Recipe for Soft Context Compression in RAG](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05152/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.