EntroPrefill: Renyi-Guided Context Pruning with Conditional Stability Guarantees for Retrieval-Augmented Generation
cs.LG, stat.ML
Submitted: 2026-10-07
Updated: 2026-10-07
Comments: 16 pages, 0 figures. Theoretical framework and conditional stability guarantees for context pruning; no empirical evaluation or benchmarks are included
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
The gist: Mid-prefill pruning can reduce the sequence processed by deeper transformer layers, but attention concentration alone does not certify that discarded context is dispensable.
Terminology
Abstract
Mid-prefill pruning can reduce the sequence processed by deeper transformer layers, but attention concentration alone does not certify that discarded context is dispensable. We formulate EntroPrefill as a Renyi-guided proposal mechanism coupled to explicit constraints on discarded attention mass. Sink-isolated, regularized head pooling respects grouped-query attention while exposing a quantitative trade-off between specialization and worst-head coverage. We derive a mixture-to-head deletion envelope, a computable upper bound on feasible token removal, and a finite-sample observer guarantee that remains valid when the pruning layer is selected adaptively. We then establish a conditional transformer perturbation bound with explicit sufficient Lipschitz constants and a first-token decision-margin corollary. A counterexample shows why shallow observations alone cannot imply an unconditional future-output guarantee. The systems analysis distinguishes query-head unions, physical page allocation, and KV-transfer payload, and gives an arithmetic break-even condition for pruning. This manuscript is theoretical in scope: it defines the procedure, its assumptions, and its formal limits, but does not report measured acceleration or task-accuracy preservation. Experiments are reserved for subsequent validation of the assumptions, approximation tightness, and end-to-end resource trade-offs.
Sources
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- AttentionRAG: Attention-Guided Context Pruning in Retrieval-Augmented Generation
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- Taming Throughput-Latency Tradeoff in LLM Inference with Sarathi-Serve
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