# Learning When Not to Listen: Selective Anti-Interference Pretraining for Language Models

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.27925 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27925/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 31 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 22 Aug 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 31)

- [RoFormer: Enhanced Transformer with Rotary Position Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.09864/) (2021)
- [FlashAttention: Fast and Memory-Efficient Exact Attention with IO-Awareness](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2205.14135/) (2022)
- [Lost in the Middle: How Language Models Use Long Contexts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2307.03172/) (2023)
- [Longformer: The Long-Document Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.05150/) (2020)
- [Efficient Streaming Language Models with Attention Sinks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.17453/) (2023)
- [Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1901.02860/) (2019)
- [Big Bird: Transformers for Longer Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.14062/) (2020)
- [Reformer: The Efficient Transformer](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.04451/) (2020)
- [LongBench: A Bilingual, Multitask Benchmark for Long Context Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.14508/) (2023)
- [RULER: What's the Real Context Size of Your Long-Context Language Models?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.06654/) (2024)
- [Train Short, Test Long: Attention with Linear Biases Enables Input Length Extrapolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2108.12409/) (2021)
- [Unsupervised Data Augmentation for Consistency Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.12848/) (2019)
- [Virtual Adversarial Training: A Regularization Method for Supervised and Semi-Supervised Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1704.03976/) (2017)
- [Large Language Models Can Be Easily Distracted by Irrelevant Context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.00093/) (2023)
- [Extending Context Window of Large Language Models via Positional Interpolation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.15595/) (2023)
- [LongBench v2: Towards Deeper Understanding and Reasoning on Realistic Long-context Multitasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.15204/) (2024)
- [∞Bench: Extending Long Context Evaluation Beyond 100K Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13718/) (2024)
- [LongRoPE: Extending LLM Context Window Beyond 2 Million Tokens](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.13753/) (2024)
- [Long-context LLMs Struggle with Long In-context Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.02060/) (2024)
- [R-Drop: Regularized Dropout for Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.14448/) (2021)
- [LooGLE: Can Long-Context Language Models Understand Long Contexts?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04939/) (2023)
- [ZeroSCROLLS: A Zero-Shot Benchmark for Long Text Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14196/) (2023)
- [SCROLLS: Standardized CompaRison Over Long Language Sequences](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2201.03533/) (2022)
- [LongWriter: Unleashing 10,000+ Word Generation from Long Context LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.07055/) (2024)
- [NoLiMa: Long-Context Evaluation Beyond Literal Matching](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.05167/) (2025)
- [HELMET: How to Evaluate Long-Context Language Models Effectively and Thoroughly](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.02694/) (2024)
- [Leave No Document Behind: Benchmarking Long-Context LLMs with Extended Multi-Doc QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.17419/) (2024)
- [PoSE: Efficient Context Window Extension of LLMs via Positional Skip-wise Training](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2309.10400/) (2023)
- [LongCite: Enabling LLMs to Generate Fine-grained Citations in Long-context QA](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02897/) (2024)
- [NeedleBench: Evaluating LLM Retrieval and Reasoning Across Varying Information Densities](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.11963/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Language models can over-condition on irrelevant preceding text: predictions already supported by local context may still change when distant, unrelated prefix tokens are perturbed. This interference is especially consequential in long, packed, or distractor-heavy contexts, where useful evidence and irrelevant spans coexist. We propose Selective Prefix Anti-Interference Regularization (SPAR), a pretraining objective for selective anti-interference. SPAR runs the original sequence and a corrupt-prefix input in which only the far prefix is changed, then uses a short-context sufficiency gate and a gated KL objective to stabilize locally supported suffix predictions. The gate operationalizes a model-based estimate of whether the far prefix supplies additional information about the target token. Mechanism analyses show that the gate identifies locally sufficient tokens and sharply reduces prefix sensitivity on gate-selected suffix tokens. In continued training on pretrained base models, SPAR improves RULER across Qwen2.5-0.5B, Qwen2.5-3B, Llama-3.2-1B, Llama-3.1-8B, and GPT2-XL under equal counted training compute; pretraining experiments further show gains on both RULER and NoLiMa. These results show that selective anti-interference is an effective objective-level signal for robust context use.