# AdmTree: Compressing Lengthy Context with Adaptive Semantic Trees

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.04550 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.04550/

## Key facts

- Cited by 8 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 62 of its 79 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 4 Dec 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, 30 of 62)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [LLaMA: Open and Efficient Foundation Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.13971/) (2023)
- [Training Verifiers to Solve Math Word Problems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.14168/) (2021)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [Dense Passage Retrieval for Open-Domain Question Answering](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.04906/) (2020)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Qwen Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.16609/) (2023)
- [The Pile: An 800GB Dataset of Diverse Text for Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2101.00027/) (2020)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Large Language Models: A Survey](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.10997/) (2023)
- [Challenging BIG-Bench Tasks and Whether Chain-of-Thought Can Solve Them](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.09261/) (2022)
- [A Survey on Hallucination in Large Language Models: Principles, Taxonomy, Challenges, and Open Questions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.05232/) (2023)
- [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)
- [MemGPT: Towards LLMs as Operating Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.08560/) (2023)
- [Unsupervised Dense Information Retrieval with Contrastive Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.09118/) (2021)
- [SnapKV: LLM Knows What You are Looking for Before Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.14469/) (2024)
- [LongLLMLingua: Accelerating and Enhancing LLMs in Long Context Scenarios via Prompt Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06839/) (2023)
- [Learning to Compress Prompts with Gist Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.08467/) (2023)
- [Complexity-Based Prompting for Multi-Step Reasoning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2210.00720/) (2022)
- [LongBench v2: Towards Deeper Understanding and Reasoning on Realistic Long-context Multitasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15204/) (2024)
- [Adapting Language Models to Compress Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14788/) (2023)
- [LLMLingua-2: Data Distillation for Efficient and Faithful Task-Agnostic Prompt Compression](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.12968/) (2024)
- [A Survey on Mixture of Experts in Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.06204/) (2024)
- [In-context Autoencoder for Context Compression in a Large Language Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.06945/) (2023)
- [Compressing Context to Enhance Inference Efficiency of Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.06201/) (2023)
- [Data Engineering for Scaling Language Models to 128K Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10171/) (2024)
- [BookSum: A Collection of Datasets for Long-form Narrative Summarization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.08209/) (2021)
- [RedPajama: an Open Dataset for Training Large Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.12372/) (2024)
- [A Human-Inspired Reading Agent with Gist Memory of Very Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.09727/) (2024)
- [Learned Token Pruning for Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2107.00910/) (2021)

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

- [EvoConfig: Self-Evolving Multi-Agent Systems for Efficient Autonomous Environment Configuration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.16489/) (2026)
- [Kwai Summary Attention Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.24432/) (2026)
- [SemantiCache: Efficient KV Cache Compression via Semantic Chunking and Clustered Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.14303/) (2026)
- [From Context to EDUs: Faithful and Structured Context Compression via Elementary Discourse Unit Decomposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.14244/) (2025)
- [Global Context Compression with Interleaved Vision-Text Transformation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.10378/) (2026)
- [Experience-Driven Dynamic Exits for LLMs with Reinforcement Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.03113/) (2026)
- [Planning with Transformers: Chain of Computation and Structured Context Windows](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.17710/) (2026)
- [Kwai Summary Attention V2 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.18654/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The quadratic complexity of self-attention constrains Large Language Models (LLMs) in processing long contexts, a capability essential for many advanced applications. Context compression aims to alleviate this computational bottleneck while retaining critical semantic information. However, existing approaches often fall short: explicit methods may compromise local detail, whereas implicit methods can suffer from positional biases, information degradation, or an inability to capture long-range semantic dependencies. We propose AdmTree, a novel framework for adaptive, hierarchical context compression with a central focus on preserving high semantic fidelity while maintaining efficiency. AdmTree dynamically segments input based on information density, utilizing gist tokens to summarize variable-length segments as the leaves of a semantic binary tree. This structure, together with a lightweight aggregation mechanism and a frozen backbone LLM (thereby minimizing new trainable parameters), enables efficient hierarchical abstraction of the context. By preserving fine-grained details alongside global semantic coherence, mitigating positional bias, and dynamically adapting to content, AdmTree robustly retains the semantic information of long contexts.
