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DySCO: Dynamic Attention-Scaling Decoding for Long-Context LMs

Xi Ye, Wuwei Zhang, Fangcong Yin, Howard Yen, Danqi Chen · Feb 25, 2026 · Citations: 0

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Coverage: Stale

Use this page to decide whether the paper is strong enough to influence an eval design. It summarizes the abstract plus available structured metadata. If the signal is thin, use it as background context and compare it against stronger hub pages before making protocol choices.

Best use

Background context only

Metadata: Stale

Trust level

Low

Signals: Stale

What still needs checking

Extraction flags indicate low-signal or possible false-positive protocol mapping.

Signal confidence: 0.35

Abstract

Understanding and reasoning over long contexts is a crucial capability for language models (LMs). Although recent models support increasingly long context windows, their accuracy often deteriorates as input length grows. In practice, models often struggle to keep attention aligned with the most relevant context throughout decoding. In this work, we propose DySCO, a novel decoding algorithm for improving long-context reasoning. DySCO leverages retrieval heads--a subset of attention heads specialized for long-context retrieval--to identify task-relevant tokens at each decoding step and explicitly up-weight them. By doing so, DySCO dynamically adjusts attention during generation to better utilize relevant context. The method is training-free and can be applied directly to any off-the-shelf LMs. Across multiple instruction-tuned and reasoning models, DySCO consistently improves performance on challenging long-context reasoning benchmarks, yielding relative gains of up to 25% on MRCR and LongBenchV2 at 128K context length with modest additional compute. Further analysis highlights the importance of both dynamic attention rescaling and retrieval-head-guided selection for the effectiveness of the method, while providing interpretability insights into decoding-time attention behavior. Our code is available at https://github.com/princeton-pli/DySCO.

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  • Extraction flags indicate low-signal or possible false-positive protocol mapping.
  • Extraction confidence is 0.35 (below strong-reference threshold).
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HFEPX Relevance Assessment

This paper is adjacent to HFEPX scope and is best used for background context, not as a primary protocol reference.

Best use

Background context only

Use if you need

A secondary eval reference to pair with stronger protocol papers.

Main weakness

Extraction flags indicate low-signal or possible false-positive protocol mapping.

Trust level

Low

Eval-Fit Score

0/100 • Low

Treat as adjacent context, not a core eval-method reference.

Human Feedback Signal

Not explicit in abstract metadata

Evaluation Signal

Detected

HFEPX Fit

Adjacent candidate

Extraction confidence: Low

If you are doing eval pipeline work, start here:

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What This Page Found In The Paper

Each field below shows whether the signal looked explicit, partial, or missing in the available metadata. Use this to judge what is safe to trust directly and what still needs full-paper validation.

Human Feedback Types

missing

None explicit

Confidence: Low Not found

No explicit feedback protocol extracted.

Evidence snippet: Understanding and reasoning over long contexts is a crucial capability for language models (LMs).

Evaluation Modes

partial

Automatic Metrics

Confidence: Low Direct evidence

Includes extracted eval setup.

Evidence snippet: Understanding and reasoning over long contexts is a crucial capability for language models (LMs).

Quality Controls

missing

Not reported

Confidence: Low Not found

No explicit QC controls found.

Evidence snippet: Understanding and reasoning over long contexts is a crucial capability for language models (LMs).

Benchmarks / Datasets

missing

Not extracted

Confidence: Low Not found

No benchmark anchors detected.

Evidence snippet: Understanding and reasoning over long contexts is a crucial capability for language models (LMs).

Reported Metrics

partial

Accuracy, Context length

Confidence: Low Direct evidence

Useful for evaluation criteria comparison.

Evidence snippet: Although recent models support increasingly long context windows, their accuracy often deteriorates as input length grows.

Rater Population

missing

Unknown

Confidence: Low Not found

Rater source not explicitly reported.

Evidence snippet: Understanding and reasoning over long contexts is a crucial capability for language models (LMs).

Human Data Lens

  • Uses human feedback: No
  • Feedback types: None
  • Rater population: Unknown
  • Unit of annotation: Unknown
  • Expertise required: Coding
  • Signal basis: Structured extraction plus abstract evidence.

Evaluation Lens

  • Evaluation modes: Automatic Metrics
  • Agentic eval: None
  • Quality controls: Not reported
  • Signal confidence: 0.35
  • Known cautions: low_signal, possible_false_positive

Protocol And Measurement Signals

Benchmarks / Datasets

No benchmark or dataset names were extracted from the available abstract.

Reported Metrics

accuracycontext length

Research Brief

Metadata summary

Understanding and reasoning over long contexts is a crucial capability for language models (LMs).

Based on abstract + metadata only. Check the source paper before making high-confidence protocol decisions.

Key Takeaways

  • Understanding and reasoning over long contexts is a crucial capability for language models (LMs).
  • Although recent models support increasingly long context windows, their accuracy often deteriorates as input length grows.
  • In practice, models often struggle to keep attention aligned with the most relevant context throughout decoding.

Researcher Actions

  • Compare this paper against nearby papers in the same arXiv category before using it for protocol decisions.
  • Validate inferred eval signals (Automatic metrics) against the full paper.
  • Use related-paper links to find stronger protocol-specific references.

Caveats

  • Generated from abstract + metadata only; no PDF parsing.
  • Signals below are heuristic and may miss details reported outside the abstract.

Recommended Queries

Accuracy

Research Summary

Contribution Summary

  • Although recent models support increasingly long context windows, their accuracy often deteriorates as input length grows.
  • In this work, we propose DySCO, a novel decoding algorithm for improving long-context reasoning.
  • Across multiple instruction-tuned and reasoning models, DySCO consistently improves performance on challenging long-context reasoning benchmarks, yielding relative gains of up to 25% on MRCR and LongBenchV2 at 128K context length with…

Why It Matters For Eval

  • Across multiple instruction-tuned and reasoning models, DySCO consistently improves performance on challenging long-context reasoning benchmarks, yielding relative gains of up to 25% on MRCR and LongBenchV2 at 128K context length with…

Researcher Checklist

  • Gap: Human feedback protocol is explicit

    No explicit human feedback protocol detected.

  • Pass: Evaluation mode is explicit

    Detected: Automatic Metrics

  • Gap: Quality control reporting appears

    No calibration/adjudication/IAA control explicitly detected.

  • Gap: Benchmark or dataset anchors are present

    No benchmark/dataset anchor extracted from abstract.

  • Pass: Metric reporting is present

    Detected: accuracy, context length

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