Jet-Long: Efficient Long-Context Extension with Dynamic Bifocal RoPE

Abstract

Modern LLMs are increasingly deployed in long-context applications such as retrieval-augmented generation, repository-level coding, and agentic workflows whose accumulated reasoning and tool traces routinely push the input an order of magnitude past the pretraining window, making zero-shot context extension the dominant deployment path for open-weight checkpoints. The dominant zero-shot methods (YaRN, Self-Extend, DCA) fix a single rescaling factor up front, so an aggressive factor sacrifices short-context fidelity while a conservative one breaks down at long contexts; recent length-aware variants adapt the mapping, but with a fitted or distance-dependent schedule. We propose Jet-Long, a tuning-free zero-shot method that pairs a local RoPE-faithful window with a long-range window whose rescaling factor adapts dynamically to the current sequence length via a parameter-free analytic schedule, recovering the base model exactly at short inputs while extrapolating cleanly at long ones. An inclusion-exclusion attention merge and on-the-fly RoPE correction enable a fused CuTe implementation. On H100 at 64K-128K, prefill retains 83-88% of FlashAttention-3 throughput across the evaluated Qwen3 sizes and 88-93% of a matched CuTe control; Qwen3-8B single-batch generation reaches 1.04-1.08 times FlashAttention-3 throughput. On Qwen3-1.7B/4B/8B up to 128K context, Jet-Long leads RULER by +4.79/+2.18/+2.03 percentage points over the strongest baseline at 1.7B/4B/8B, achieves the best overall accuracy on HELMET-RAG (a benchmark identified by HELMET as the most efficient predictor of downstream long-context performance) and attains the lowest PG-19 perplexity. Additional evaluations cover Meta-Llama-3-8B, post-trained Qwen3 checkpoints, and the hybrid Jet-Nemotron architecture, supporting broader applicability without retraining. The local-window hyperparameter remains robust across the tested settings.